regard to this great national undertaking." He had letters which showed that the number of real signatures affixed to the petition in England, Scotland, and Wales, was four million eight hundred thousand. Finally he declared that thirteen clerks could not have counted the signatures in seventeen hours. Then after a warm passage of arms with some members, he left the House. The ridicule caused by this disclosure may be said to have killed the Chartist movement, for though some abortive meetings at which inflammatory speeches were made, it gradually dwindled into insignificance. The effect of its collapse on Feargus O'Connor was lamentable. His chief occupation gone, the labour of his best years a waste, he sought excitement in drink. Four years later than the date of the monster meeting, he was a patient in Dr. Tuke's asylum for the insane at Chiswick. There he remained about two years, when he was pronounced cured. A stricken melancholy man with the memory of a great failure in the past, and the fear of mental darkness in the future, he survived his liberty only by twelve months and died in August 1855. On the evening when the report of the petition was made before a House shaking with laughter, a man destined to become a tragic and heroic figure in Irish history addressed it for the last time. This was William Smith O'Brien, then in his forty-fifth year. A son of an Irish baronet, a descendant of the ancient Earls of Thomond, he was proud of being able to trace his ancestry in an the famous Irish King. Harrow and at Cambridge. erect, with strongly marked features, a long dark face, bright brown hair, his expression marked by melancholy. By temperament a dreamer, his manners were grave: he was deadly in earnest in all his undertakings, and stubbornly determined to carry out his will at all cost. Though Irish to the backbone, he like another Irish leader of modern times, had none of the qualities generally found in his countrymen; for he was a poor orator, he had no sense of humour, no quickness of repartee, and was wholly devoid of that buoyancy which strives to conciliate misfortune with a smile. unbroken line to Brian Boru, William had been educated at In person he was tall and As one of the distinguished recruits to O'Connell's Repeal movement, O'Brien had taken an active interest in it, and on the imprisonment of its chief, had taken his place as its head. Among other recruits were John Francis Meagher, John Mitchell, John Dillon, Charles Gavan Duffy, who youthful and reckless, became impatient with O'Connell's legal methods to obtain a separate legislation for their country, and advocated physical force. The final severance of the Young Irelanders, as they were called, from the Repeal Association, took place in July 1846, soon after which O'Brien founded the Irish Confederation. The startling intelligence that Hungary sought a separate legislation from Austria, that Sicily made the same claim from Naples, thrilled the Young Irelanders with hope and filled them with ambitious endeavour; but when news of the French revolution reached them, their elation swept them beyond the cold boundary of prudence. The story of what followed is related in many histories and biographies, and is given in detail in Four Years of Irish History, by a prominent spirit of the movement, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. It is told here briefly and without prejudice. Within a fortnight of the proclamation of the French revolution, the Irish Confederation held a meeting in Dublin at which O'Brien said the Confederation invited all classes who desired the legislative independence of Ireland to inscribe their names on a roll of persons willing to serve in a National Guard. He had previously deprecated the advice that the people should be trained in military knowledge; but circumstances were altered, and he now thought the attention of intelligent young men might be occupied by considerations as to how strong places could be captured and weak ones defended. More than a third of the British army consisted of Irishmen; there were ten thousand Irishmen serving in the Constabulary; and with both these forces the people ought to cultivate friendly relations. The Irish people were willing and anxious to come to an understanding with the British |