they had not resigned from the Association. They would willingly have continued to act, but when they made inquiries on the subject the Secretary was authorised to inform them, as we shall see, that they were not and could not be members.
I must pause here for a moment on the cardinal question—Who caused this secession? It is one that cannot be put aside or evaded. It involves a tremendous responsibility—responsibility under which the strongest shoulders might break like pipe stopple; for it may be justly doubted whether one man of the two million of the Irish people who perished in the Famine would have been permitted to die of starvation if the strength of the National Party had remained unbroken and its spirit unsubdued. The young men had no wish to retire, no conceivable interest in retiring. By retiring they were abandoning to their opponents the council chamber from which the people expected guidance. They were leaving not to O'Connell, but to Mr. John O'Connell, the cause upon which all their hopes were set. They were certain to be misrepresented and maligned in their absence, and by the one act of separating from the Association their public career was apparently brought to an end. But it is beyond controversy that they had no choice. Mr. John O'Connell, as we have seen, came over from London expressly to declare his father's will, and his will was that he and those who had dissented from his new and incredible propositions could not remain in the Association together. One or other must immediately go.
The Secession, and all its fearful consequences, was the work of Mr. John O'Connell; as his brother Maurice declared on the last day of his life, "John did all the mischief."[1]
- ↑ A startling confirmation of the public verdict against Mr. John O'Connell, as the mischief maker, came to me by a curious accident. In the session of '54, one night in the House of Commons, Maurice O'Connell, with whom I had ordinarily little or no communication, crossed the floor and sat down by me. He had long wished, he said, to correct a misapprehension which he believed existed in my mind, that he had been a party to the disastrous quarrel between his father and the Young Irelanders. On the contrary, he had strongly opposed it, and never crossed the threshold of Conciliation Hall after it happened while his father lived. John had done it all. His own influence with his father had also been undermined in his old age (as I understood by the same person). I was so surprised and puzzled by this unexpected confidence that I excused myself on the ground that I had an appointment with some friends. While I was sitting, immediately after, in the tea-room with Dr. Brady, member
