terest in it. In
1850 an attempt at a union of North and South was made, and a Tenant
League Conference assembled in Dublin. Of this league the remnants of
the "Young Ireland" party formed the nucleus, but were supplemented by
others with widely different aims and intentions. Of these others the
two Sadleirs, John and James, Mr. Edmund O'Flaherty, and Mr. William
Keogh, afterwards Judge Keogh, were the most prominent. These with their
adherents constituted the once famous "Brass Band" which for several
years filled Parliament with its noisy declamations, and which posed as
the specially appointed champion of Catholicism. In 1853 several of its
members took office under Lord Aberdeen, but their course was not a long
one. A bank kept in Ireland by the two Sadleirs broke, ruining an
enormous number of people, and on investigation was found to have been
fraudulently conducted from the very beginning. John Sadleir thereupon
killed himself; his brother James was expelled from the House of
Commons, and he and several others implicated in the swindle fled the
country and never reappeared, and so the "Brass Band" broke up, amid the
well-deserved contempt of men of every shade of political opinion.

After this succeeded a prolonged lull. Secret agitations, however, were
still working underground, and as early as 1850 one known as the Phoenix
organization began to collect recruits, although for a long time its
proceedings attracted little or no attention.

In 1859 several of its members were arrested, and it seemed then to die
down and disappear, but some years later it sprang up again with a new
name, and the years 1866 and 1867 were signalized by the Fenian rising,
or to put it with less dignity, the Fenian scare. With the close of the
American War a steady backward stream of Americanized Irishmen had set
in, and a belief that war between England and America was rapidly
approaching had become an article of fervent faith with a large majority
in Ireland. The Fenian plan of operation was a two-headed one. There was
to be a rising in Ireland, and there was to be a raid into Canada across
the American frontier. Little formidable as either project seems now, at
the time they looked serious enough, and had the strained relations then
existing between England and America turned out differently, no one can
say but what they might have become so. The Fenian organization, which
grew out of the earlier Phoenix one, was managed from centres