h followed, used these words: "I
believe that _The Times_ did much to cause the feeling which resulted in
landlord and parson shooting; it will end by turning us all into
Repealers." If only it had! But Moore got no help from the landlord
class, and the well-to-do Catholic professional men with whom he was
principally allied proved themselves unable to resist the temptations of
office and of personal interest. In the days of Sadleir and Keogh he
fought a desperate fight against Whig place-seekers; his reward was to
be finally unseated (in 1857) on an election petition, the charge being
that spiritual intimidation had been exercised on his behalf by the
priests. As Colonel Moore observes, if a landlord threatened his tenants
with disfavour, which meant eviction, that was "only a legitimate
exercise of their rights of property"; but if a priest told his flock
that a man would imperil his soul by selling his vote or prostituting it
to the use of a despot, the candidate whom that priest supported would
lose his seat and be disqualified for re-election.

From this time onward George Henry Moore found himself heading the same
way as Smith O'Brien had gone. In 1861 he told the Irish people that if
they desired freedom they must take a lesson from Italy; they must
"become dangerous"; and he advocated the formation of a new Irish
volunteer force to emulate that of 1782. Nothing came of this; but after
the American war a new movement grew up, not this time among the
landlords or the professional men, nor countenanced by the priests, but
nursed in the fierce heart of the people. Ireland had become dangerous.
Colonel Moore recognises rightly the difference between the Fenian
organisation and the Young Ireland movement which had preceded it. Both
were idealistic, but the idealism of 1848 was "the inspiration of a few
literary gentlemen, poets, and writers." Smith O'Brien, its titular
head, was influenced profoundly by the aristocratic conception of his
rightful place as representing the Kings of Thomond. Fenianism was
democratic; it was officered largely by men who had themselves fought in
the most stubborn of modern wars and who had seen what Irish regiments
could do in the citizen levies of Federals and Confederates. It was
spontaneous, and it was strong; the measure of its strength is given not
by the few flickering outbreaks easily suppressed, but by the terror
which it inspired, and by the change which it wrought in the spirit o