needed. This sacrifice Daniel O'Connell was
prepared to make. His place in history will never be estimated, for
few have been so loved or hated, or for stronger reasons. Never did a
tribune rising to power lift his people to such sudden hope and
success. Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and
decline to more terrible despair. Friend and foe admit his immensity.
He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live.
In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt. Ireland
could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for
expression. He rose on the crest of a religious agitation, but,
Emancipation won, he had the foresight to associate the Irish cause
with the advent of Reform and Liberalism throughout Europe. He
sounded the notes of free-trade and anti-slavery. What he said in
parliament one day, Ireland re-echoed the next. To her he was all in
all, her hero and her prophet, her Messias and her strong deliverer.
On the continent he roughly personified Christian Democracy.

In public oratory O'Connell introduced a new style. Torrential and
overwhelming as Flood and Grattan had never been, he proved more
successful if less polished. The exaggerations of Gaelic speech found
outburst in his English. Peel's smile was "the silver plate on a
coffin", Wellington "a stunted corporal", and Disraeli "the lineal
descendant of the impenitent thief."

It sounds bombastic, but in those feudal forties it rang more
magnificent than war. Single-voiced he overawed the host of bigots,
dullards, and reactionaries. Unhappily, he let his people abandon
their native tongue, while teaching them how to balance the rival
parties in England, the latter a policy that has proved Ireland's
fortune since. He loosed the spirit of sectarianism in the tithe war,
and he crushed the Young Ireland movement, which bred Fenianism in
its death agony. But he made the Catholic a citizen. Results
stupendous as far-reaching sprang from his steps every way.

The finest pen-sketch of O'Connell is by Mitchel, who says, "besides
superhuman and subterhuman passions, yet withal, a boundless fund of
masterly affectation and consummate histrionism, hating and loving
heartily, outrageous in his merriment and passionate in his
lamentation, he had the power to make other men hate or love, laugh
or weep, at his good pleasure."

Yet during his lifetime there lived others worthy of national
leadership. O'Brien, D