them. In Sligo he promised that there should be seventy Repealers in the next Parliament; the Clare election had carried Emancipation, and the election at which seventy Repealers were chosen would carry Repeal. In Galway he exhorted the people to elect members of the Repeal Association, two for the city and two for the county. In a public letter he bade the Whigs 'not to lay the flattering unction to their soul that this rule would be relaxed in the slighest degree'; and he warned the most gifted of them, Richard Sheil, in language which subsequent events rendered memorable, that even he must cease to sit for an Irish constituency unless he returned to his original faith as a Repealer. 'Sheil is a brilliant orator (he said); I love, I regard, and I esteem him; but when I tell him from this spot that he shall not continue to represent Dungarvan if he does not become a member of this Association, I speak a truth most unpleasant to me, but one that assuredly will be worked out.' These were promises sufficiently specific, and the time was near at hand to give them effect."[1]
It was believed to be altogether impossible that O'Connell could abandon these specific pledges without abandoning at the same time the National cause. Upon the transactions which followed I am willing to rest entirely the question whether O'Connell had made a secret compact with the Whigs, one of the conditions of which was to secure the election of Whig Ministers for National constituencies. Let it be assumed that all else which I have recorded in recent chapters the abandonment of O'Brien to the Sergeant-at-Arms; the pointing out the Nation for prosecution; the excluding the Nation from the Repeal Reading-rooms which it had created—let it be assumed that all this, and the shameful silence of Conciliation Hall on great practical issues were subtle strokes of policy to promote some great public end, but the Ministerial elections remain, and the painful and fatal contrast between O'Connell's conduct in Conciliation Hall and his correspondence in private at the same moment with Whig Ministers. The generous reader will naturally mitigate his censure on the story about to be disclosed by the memory of O'Connell's great services, by the
