en intended. The
attempt on O'Connell's part to carry a formal declaration against the
employment under any circumstances of physical force was the origin of
that division, and what the younger spirits considered "truckling to the
Whigs" helped to widen the breach. When, too, O'Connell had partially
retired into the background, his place was filled by his son, John
O'Connell, the "Head conciliator," between whom and the "Young
Irelanders" there waged a fierce war, which in the end led to the
indignant withdrawal of the latter from the Repeal council.

Before matters reached this point, the younger camp had been
strengthened by the adhesion of Smith O'Brien, who, though not a man of
much intellectual calibre, carried no little weight in Ireland. His
age--which compared to that of the other members of his party, was that
of a veteran--his rank and position as a county member, above all, his
vaunted descent from Brian Boroimhe, all made him an ally and a convert
to be proud of. Like the rest he had no idea at first of appealing to
physical force, however loudly an abstract resolution against it might
be denounced. Resistance was to be kept strictly within the
constitutional limits, indeed the very year of his junction with this
the extreme left of the Repeal party, Smith O'Brien's most violent
proceeding was to decline to sit upon a railway committee to which he
had been summoned, an act of contumacy for which he was ordered by the
House of Commons into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms, and committed
to an extemporized prison, by some cruelly declared to be the coal-hole.
"An Irish leader in a coal-hole!" exclaims Sir Charles Gavan Duffy,
indignantly, can more unworthy statement be conceived? "Regullus in a
barrel, however," he adds, rather grandly, "was not quite the last one
heard of Rome and its affairs!"

In Ireland matters were certainly sad enough and serious enough without
any such serio-comic incidents. Famine was already stalking the country
with giant strides, and no palliative measures as yet proposed seemed to
be of the slightest avail. Early in January, 1847, O'Connell left on
that journey of his which was never completed, and by the middle of May
Ireland was suddenly startled by the news that her great leader
was dead.

The effect of his death was to produce a sudden and immense reaction. A
vast revulsion of love and reverence sprang up all over the country; an
immense sense of his incomparable services