“That is a fallacy. They had no war policy, nor had he. It was the blaze of revolution lighted in Paris in forty-eight that set men on fire here. They seceded from O’Connell on the point of the celebrated test resolutions, which declared it would not be lawful to take up arms for the recovery of national rights. The non-acceptance of this declaration led to the Irish Confederation. The confederates were decidedly unpopular, especially after the death of O’Connell, whose demise was laid at their door, and they themselves became the victims of secession. John Mitchel and his following were for preparing the people for war against England. Thus we had three parties and no real national movement. When Paris hurled Louis Philippe from the throne, the pulse of Ireland became intensely agitated, and two schools of insurrectionists were to be found in the new insurrectionary party: one that declared that Smith O’Brien wanted a rose-water revolution, the other that Mitchel was a Red and wanted a Jacquerie. The refusal to rise for the release of Mitchel led to bad blood, and the subsequent rising resulted in a fiasco. The men who ordered it had no command from the nation, and were but a fraction of a fraction.”
“Were you opposed to them, father—I mean your order?”
“Assuredly not in a combative sense, but in the sense of a decided disapproval of the insurrection. They had also against them the bulk of the Repeal millions.”
“But the cities—”
“Yes, the cities became imbued with the spirit of the revolution and a desire to see it out, but, beyond their national antipathy to English rule, the rural population had little or no participation in the forty-eight movement.”
“They wor aisy enough beyant in Kilpeddher, where they bet Mickey Rooney wud his own pike-handle an’ called him a bladdher-um-skite, no less,” cried my coachman.
“Peter, be good enough to keep your observations to yourself,” I said, struggling with a laugh.
“Faix I will, thin, Masther Freddy, for sorra a word the darlint father is spakin’ I’d like for to lose. But as for th’ other omadhaun,” lowering his voice to a confidential whisper, “I’d as lave be spakin’ to—”
“Silence!”
“After the forty-eight movement had exhausted itself in transportations and expatriations,” continued Father O’Dowd, “and the flower of Ireland’s intellect and patriotism was literally pining away in England’s penal settlements, the gaze of the country turned instinctively toward one man, Charles Gavan Duffy, and behind him crouched the terrible problem: ‘What next?’”