The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.
The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the Kerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the first occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded justice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his hand to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his heart was with it.
Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed not a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his first efforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harsh avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's; the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and patriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry, the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union, became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been feared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers of derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,—on that very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken down.
No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of colonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated." He left Sir Robert Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood, building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as well as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would, he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what cast or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political, intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. He was for justice,—justice in the name of humanity and according to the righteous law of the living God.
Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to our glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiastic admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of slavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever man has been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has been directed: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancient liberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing the foot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; and last, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, and dragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadly embrace of her oppressor. American slavery but shares in his common denunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pity for the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down.
In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain the sense of the people." It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The Irish Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. It diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threw no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. (Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.)
In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain. Like Tallien, before the French convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had only partially lifted. He held up before the people of Great Britain the new indignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland's wrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, for redress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of his country's defiance and scorn. There is a fine burst of indignant Irish feeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:—
"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by this Reform Bill. My letters are long before the public. They have been unrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details. And with this case of atrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of Great Britain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive? Why, I have got some half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and political characters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestir themselves in our behalf!
"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or be silent. I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor of the Irish. You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity, unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine.
"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by peaceable and legal means."