"Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow."
The moment I read that passage, he once said, I saw it was the motto for Ireland; and up to 1829, the year of Emancipation, he seldom spoke without quoting it. He avoided figurative language. He amused his audience with stories and old sayings which they understood and appreciated. He brought the shrewd apothegms, familiar at their own firesides, to bear upon the principles he was inculcating, but flowers of rhetoric he knew would be feeble weapons for the warfare in which he was engaged. He once indeed complimented Sheil, by calling him "the brightest star that ever rose in the murky horizon of his afflicted country;" but that suited the man and the occasion.
He had a true conception of what a great teacher ought to be; and for this reason he kept repeating his principles and his arguments in the same or almost the same words. Many an admirer of his thought he dosed his countrymen far too much with, "first flower of the earth," and "Hereditary bondsmen;" but, as he said about his attacks on men, it was calculation made him do it, and he proclaimed this so late as 1846, at the Repeal Association, in the following words: "I have often said, and repeated it over and over again, that I had found, that it was not sufficient in politics to enunciate a new proposition, one, or two, or three times. I continue to repeat it, until it comes back like an echo from the different parts of the country; then I know it is understood, and I leave it to its fate." The lesson had been learned.
Physically, O'Connell was a very powerful man. He was taller than he seemed, his muscular frame taking away, in appearance, from his height. The earliest portraits of him make him a soft-faced athletic young man, very likely to be a dangerous antagonist in the prize ring, but his features, as given at the time, bear scarcely any resemblance to later portraits of him. His shoulders were broad, and in walking he pushed them forward alternately in a rather remarkable manner. This peculiarity, arising more from physical necessity than from choice, gave him a sort of slinging gait, which caused a Tory print to call him, derisively, "Swaggering Dan." This nickname of their favourite did not offend the people, they even thought it appropriate, there was such a dashing independence in his whole manner; and Shiel never wrote anything more felicitously true, than when he said of him—"He shoulders his umbrella like a pike, and throws out his legs, as if he were kicking Protestant ascendancy before him."
O'Connell was a liberal in the highest sense; he loved toleration; but he was also a Catholic to the heart's core—thorough, uncompromising: proud of the down-trodden Church to which he belonged, with—at first, perhaps, an intuitive feeling; later on, the proud consciousness, that his name would be linked with her struggles and her triumphs.
"One of my earliest aspirations," he more than once said, "was to do something for the good of my country, and write my name on the page of her history." He was fervently devoted to the holy practices of the Catholic Church. The fatal result of his duel with Captain D'Esterre, seems to have exercised a marked influence upon his whole life, and he frequently alluded to it in terms of the profoundest regret. It was a sight not to be forgotten, to see him attend Mass and receive Holy Communion in Clarendon Street. When he was at home, his habit was to walk from Merrion Square to that, his favourite chapel, to eight o'clock Mass. On those occasions he usually wore a very ample cloak, the collar of which concealed the lower half of his face. Thus enveloped, he entered the sanctuary with an expression of recollection so profound, that it might have been a Trappist who had entered. So it was during the hour he remained: he seemed perfectly unconscious of any human creature being in the place, except the priest at the altar before him. He seldom used a prayer-book, and his eyes were never once raised during the whole time. Buried in his great cloak, he moved noiselessly out, as he had entered—a bright example,—a very model,—to the whole congregation.
The remaining reports of the Relief Commissioners do not call for any very lengthened notice. The fourth of the series was published on the 19th of July, at which time 1,823 electoral divisions were receiving relief under the Act. They say: "By an arrangement with the Commissary General, we are clearing out the Government depôts of provisions, by orders on them in lieu of so much money. These depôts were established at an anxious period of a prospect of great deficiency of supplies, which no longer exists." It is needless to repeat here what has been abundantly proved before, that the people died of starvation within the shadow of those sealed up depôts, and they would not be opened;—they were opened when the supplies they contained were not required, there being plenty in the market.
From the accountant's department we learn that 2,643,128 rations were being daily issued, which it was hoped would be the maximum relief that the Commissioners would be called on to administer; 79,636 of these were sold. This shows an increase of daily rations from last report of 291,028. The fall in provisions had reduced the price of each ration from 2-1/2d. to 2d. The amount given in loans and grants was now reduced by about £3,000 a day, the expenditure in that way being then about £20,000 a day. The aggregate amount of money issued up to the 19th of July was £1,010,184 7s. 10d. to 1,803 electoral divisions. The cost of the Government staff for superintending the issuing of relief, is set down at two and a half per cent.—6d. in the pound,—a low figure, indeed, but it must be taken into account that they only superintended; the committees did the actual work of giving out the relief. The issue of cooked food was opposed by the people in some places, and this opposition was punished, by a reduction being made in the quantity of rations issued in such places. In a fortnight, about 8,000 tons of the food in the Government depôts were given in lieu of money, the money value of which was £98,728, the daily market price being that charged by the Commissary General. The arrangement was carried out in this way: There was issued on the 1st of June a circular to the inspecting officer of each Union, by virtue of which an order on the Government depôt was given to the Finance Committee of the Union, instead of the amount (in cash) of the fortnightly estimate sent in of the sum required for each electoral division of that Union; but the whole fortnightly estimate was not usually supplied in meal only, to any one electoral division; it was given partly in meal and partly in money.
At this time there were thirty-three Commissariat depôts, and sixteen British Association depôts.