a minister who felt he had
the confidence of the country and was sustained by great parliamentary
majorities; and when the summoner of monster meetings was convicted, and
the efficient though impartial manner in which the labours of the land
commission were simultaneously conducted came to be bruited about, there
seemed at last some prospect of the system of political quackery of
which Ireland had been so long the victim being at last subverted. But
there is nothing in which the power of circumstances is more evident
than in politics. They baffle the forethought of statesmen, and control
even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.

Had the government of 1841 succeeded in its justifiable expectation of
terminating the trade of political agitation in Ireland, armed with all
the authority and all the information with which the labours of the land
commission would have furnished them, they would in all probability have
successfully grappled with the real causes of Irish misery and misrule.
They might have thoroughly reformed the modes by which land is holden
and occupied; have anticipated the spontaneous emigration that now rages
by an administrative enterprise scarcely more costly than the barren
loan of '47, and which would have wafted native energies to imperial
shores; have limited under these circumstances the evil of the potato
famine, even if the improved culture of the interval might not have
altogether prevented that visitation; while the laws which regulated the
competition between home and foreign industry in agricultural produce
might have been modified with so much prudence, or, if necessary,
ultimately repealed with so much precaution, that those rapid and
startling vicissitudes that have so shattered the social fabric of
Ireland might altogether have been avoided.

But it was decreed that it should be otherwise. Having achieved the
incredible conviction of O'Connell, by an Irish jury, the great culprit
baffled the vengeance of the law by a quirk which a lawyer only could
have devised. As regards his Irish policy, Sir Robert Peel never
recovered this blow, the severity of which was proportionably increased
by its occurrence at a moment of unprecedented success. Resolute not to
recur to his ancient Orangeism, yet desperate after his discomfiture of
rallying a moderate party around his ministry, his practical mind,
more clear-sighted than foreseeing, was alarmed at the absence of all