Next day I was requested to attend a consultation at the Mansion House. The Lord Mayor, who was furious at the discredit brought on the Centenary, and at the slight support he had received from the Freeman's Journal, proposed to establish a daily paper, to found an association on the old Repeal principles, and contest every National seat in Ireland. He spoke disparagingly of Mr. Butt, and said the Tories who had joined him at the outset of his movement had all deserted, and he had now no supporters except some of the most extreme or discredited of the National party. The most important men who had come to town for the Centenary, lay and ecclesiastical, might be counted on, he said, to support this new movement. I said I felt the deepest disgust at a policy which set the interest of a faction or of some particular demagogue over the plain interests of Ireland, that the Centenary should be a serene and majestic exhibition, but I was not going to make another Irish faction. Their project would probably fail. £50,000 would be needed for a daily paper; where were they to find such a sum? and the most influential men in the country would scarcely set up another Association, and I fancied that many of them felt as I did, that it would discredit them to try. The Lord Mayor declared that he had ascertained that he could certainly get both the men and the money, if I remained at home and undertook the direction of these enterprises. Dr. Cullen, for example, had promised a substantial portion of the necessary capital for the newspaper. "Then he cannot possibly know," I said, "that you propose to ask me to control the enterprise." "Yes, he does," he rejoined, "the Archbishop has entirely changed his opinion on your Irish policy." "But alas!" I replied, "I have not changed my opinion about his. To ask me to direct a newspaper and a party, whose funds are to be largely furnished by
of the transaction imputing the blame to the negligence and mismanagement of the committee:
"There were probably not a dozen men in the room who recognise in the stranger who rose at a particular moment Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and the tumultuous protests against the committee manipulation of toasts and speakers had burst forth long previously. It was no contention whatever between Mr. Butt, Mr. Duffy, and Mr. Downing, The committee—or rather the person or persons who so disastrously mismanaged those things—did not place the name of a single speaker on the printed toast-lists, and consequently the assembly were kept in blank ignorance of who was to speak at all."
