Over against the conventional and moderate
English statesmen with whom we have so far been
concerned there loomed, from the other side of St.
George's Channel, the figure of Daniel O'Connell.
To the service of Ireland he had brought a devotion
which, if no more intense than that of others before
and since, was exercised in a larger fashion, through
a greater number of years, and to a more effective
result. Gifted with an eloquence which could with
an equal sureness touch the springs of laughter and
of tears, and, in its command over the emotions of
large masses of men, has never been surpassed;
gifted with an organising faculty not inferior to
his eloquence; able to excite and, far more remark-
ably, to control the Irish people with a sway that
no one has since asserted, he was, in 1827, approach-
ing the zenith of his career. Resenting, with a
patriotism at once religious and national, the con-
ditions under which the Union had been brought
to pass, but realising, from ineffaceable memories of
his youth, that the last hope of armed resistance had
been buried in the graves of Fitzgerald and
Emmet, he had lavished the united powers of an
orator, a lawyer and a man of affairs on welding his
Catholic fellow-countrymen into a political force,
and had founded the most widespread, the most

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