independent party of disinterested men at Westminster and to stir up in Ireland a movement that should be at once bolder in its methods and loftier and less utilitarian in its aims.

With all these sharp points of difference between "Young Ireland" and what for the future was to be known as "Old Ireland," an open rupture was bound to come about sooner or later. It had been threatening ever since O'Connell's retreat at Clontarf. It occurred finally as the result of a discussion about those provincial universities, the Queen's Colleges. Sad times followed for Ireland. The country was divided against itself. O'Connell died and left none to succeed him, and Davis himself was just dead. The great Famine broke out. But worse was to come. In the ranks of Young Ireland itself there arose a new schism. The leader of the Young Ireland party at this time was William Smith O'Brien. He was a man of patriotism and integrity, but conservative by temperament, and strongly opposed to all revolutionary ideas.5 Such ideas, however, had been rapidly gaining ground in the party. The failure of the "moral force " agitation, the wretched condition of Ireland, and the horrors of the famine which the Government had done nothing to relieve, all these combined to bring revolutionary ideas to the front. Towards the end of the year 1847 the advocates of "Physical Force " no longer hesitated to proclaim themselves. The "Montagnards," Mitchel, Meagher and others, separated from the "Girondins." The latter were not, indeed, opposed to methods of violence, but they looked upon such methods as a desperate expedient that should only be had recourse to after long preparation. The former took the opposite view. Ireland could only be saved by blood and iron. They were for an immediate rising, a holy war that should "sweep the island clear of the English name and nation.” With a reformer of the stamp of Davis the dominant

5" There is too much Smith and too little O'Brien," said somebody at the time. Young Ireland, p. 559.

passion was love of Ireland; with a revolutionary such as Mitchel it was hatred of England. The former hoped to conciliate, to assimilate the gentry of English descent; the latter thought only of destroying it. The one sought to educate the Irish and bring about a moral reform; the sole aim of the other was to rouse them to rebellion, whatever their unpreparedness, whatever the cost. Thus between Mitchel and Davis, both of them Protestants, there existed a gulf no less wide than between Davis and the Catholic O'Connell.6

John Mitchel and the "war party were expelled from the Nation. On the 12th February, 1848, he brought out the first number of his new paper, the United Irishman, in which he openly preached risings and street fighting. He called the Lord Lieutenant (Lord Clarendon) her Majesty's Executioner General and General Butcher of Ireland. The public were astonished. They looked upon him as a madman. But a fortnight later the revolution broke out in Paris. In quick succession came revolutions in Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Italy. Ireland caught the contagion. The whole country was fired. A chance of repeating 1782 seemed to have presented itself. Mitchel became the hero of the hour. All the Young Irelanders, even Smith O'Brien himself, were seized by the fever. Clubs of Confederates were organised through the country. A "national guard" began to drill and practice arms. Unhappily, divisions continued to be rife among the leaders. Mitchel was for instant action. He redoubled the violence of his articles in the United Irishman, with the aim of provoking an immediate conflict. They had no plans, no military leaders; what did that matter? Had they any at Paris or at Berlin? Long live the Irish Republic ! The Young Irelanders, on the other hand, wished to wait for the summer and thus have time for

6 As to John Mitchel see the excellent study by E. Montégut. L'Exil de la Jeune Irlande in Choses du Nord et du Midi, Paris, 1886. John Mitchel was not a mere fanatic. He was, intellectually, the most brilliant of the Young Irelanders. See his criticism of Macaulay and Bacon in his Jail Journal. He was a writer of exceptional power.

preparation. In his heart Smith O'Brien would have liked to play the part of Lafayette and make terms with the Government. He reproached the "Reds” with encouraging acts of individual violence. They on their side treated him as an aristocrat, and a "rose-water revolutionary." The English Government profited by these dissensions to nip the rising in the bud. It secretly armed the Orangemen, put Dublin under military occupation, and struck its blow by the arrest of Mitchel. On the 20th May he was condemned to transportation, and was instantly placed on board a war vessel. By the loss of their leader the insurgents were beaten in advance. But things had gone too far to turn back; the rising had to take place. It was hopeless to attempt it in Dublin. Smith O'Brien and his friends, as a counsel of despair, decided to try a rising in the country. They went through the country parts, organising bands, and possibly they might have made the south of Ireland a second Vendee had they not had to face the opposition of the clergy, who held back the people from the act of folly that was in preparation. The Insurrection of 1848 ended miserably in the tragi-comedy of the cabbage garden at Ballingarry. Abandoned by his improvised troops, that strange leader of rebellion, the Protestant landlord and aristocrat, Smith O'Brien, to save his honour, engaged in a sort of skirmish with a small body of police, who soon had him in their hands. The other leaders went into exile, or else were thrown into prison.

Thus direly and pitifully did the Young Ireland movement end in miscarriage. Men of broad mind and noble character, of proud spirit and personal courage, had brought it into being. But they had been lacking in practical qualities. They had no appreciation of the realities of life. The more violent spirits among them gained a complete empire over the rest and led them astray. The Young Ireland movement was not a revolutionary one, and yet it was to lead to revolution, and to perish through revolution. It had been a reaction against O'Connell's

opportunism and legality; it had resisted the call to arms of the extreme party. But carried along by the explosion of ideas in 1848, Young Ireland found itself compelled by force of circumstances and by considerations of honour to have recourse itself to arms, at the most inopportune time and under the most unfavourable conditions, or else lie under the charge of cowardice or treason. Now "Young Ireland" was dead. Its leaders were scattered to the four winds of the heaven. Even its ideas seemed to have perished. In reality they survived the wreck, and reappeared at a later date, when the people had recovered from the dreadful crisis through which they were now to pass, between 1847 and 1849-a crisis in which the Irish nation seemed destined to be finally extinguished-the Great Famine.

III. THE GREAT FAMINE AND EMIGRATION.1

We must go back a little in order to indicate briefly the causes of the Great Famine of 1847. The enormous increase of the population of Ireland in the end of the eighteenth, and the first half of the nineteenth century was a striking phenomenon.2 From 1782 on, and especially during the Napoleonic wars, when Ireland had become the granary of England, the country had passed through a period of great prosperity. Taking advantage of this, the landlords had multiplied the number of small holdings on their estates, as by this subdivision they increased the number of their voters and raised the total of their rents.

I The Great Famine and The Period of Emigration :-See especially, W. P. O Brien, The Great Famine, Dublin. O'Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine, 3rd Ed., Dublin, 1902. Sir Chas. E. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (Edinburgh Review, 1848). Report of the Census Čommissioners, 1851. John Mitchel, Jail Journal. League of North and South, London, 1886. edited by John O'Leary. Lord Dufferin, Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Irish Land, London, 1867. Nassau Senior, Journals' Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland, 1868.

Sir C. G. Duffy, The Writings of J. F. Lalor,

2 In 1788 the population was estimated for the first time at more than four millions (4,040,000). In 1845 it was reckoned at nearly 8 millions.

As a result, the population increased rapidly, and continued to increase notwithstanding a gradual change in economic conditions. On the conclusion of the war the rise in prices was succeeded by a fall. Tillage ceased to pay, and the landlords were naturally tempted to turn the agricultural lands into pasture. A campaign of "Clearances was inaugurated and continued without intermission. It became especially vigorous when by the Act of 1829 the smaller peasants were deprived of the right of voting. The tenantry were driven out, and their houses razed to the ground. Holdings were "consolidated." Parliament looked on complacently, and passed laws to make ejectment an inexpensive process. As there were no industries to relieve the pressure, the people crowded in upon such remnants of the soil as were left to them. They were compelled to pay famine rents, which, as John Stuart Mill put it, scarcely left them enough to stave off death from starvation. They lived on potatoes as the Chinese live on rice. Were a bad harvest to come a catastrophe must inevitably ensue.

There came not one bad harvest, but three in succession. In the autumn of 1845 three-quarters of the potato crop was destroyed in a few days by a form of blight hitherto unknown. In 1846 and 1847 the whole potato crop perished. From 1846 to 1849 famine reigned throughout the land. No sooner did the plague touch them than the people seemed plunged in a sort of stupor.

"It was no uncommon sight to see the cottier and his little family seated on the garden fence gazing all day long in moody silence at the blighted plot that had been their last hope. Nothing would rouse them. You spoke : they answered not; you tried to cheer them: they shook their heads."3

It is better, said John Mitchel, to perish by the bayonets of England than by her laws. But what were men to do, when death was all around them, at work or at home, in the houses and in the fields, on the mountains and in the

3 A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland, Ch. VI.