The weeping and gnashing of teeth among the city Patriots on account of yesterday's melancholy disappointment at the Tholsel is not to be described. What a damp must this falling off in the metropolis give to the yet unassembled bailiwicks. Alas! alas! that the city which laid the first stone of 'a national Congress' should now give a shock to the precious building! How are the mighty aggregate Committee fallen! ah, how are they despised! Resolutions, address, circular letters—all, all are scattered to the winds; and commotion, revolution, and scramble, sunk in an abyss of despair beyond all hopes of resurrection.[583]
If O'Leary attended the meeting at the Tholsel, it is easy to know what tone he took. Three years later he published a pamphlet in which he seems very familiar with the incidents of that month.
I recollect the unmerited abuse given for a long time in the papers to the Catholics, because seventeen housekeepers in Dublin unguardedly signed a requisition to the high sheriff for the purpose of convening an aggregate meeting relative to a parliamentary reform, though I am confident the seventeen knew as little about the impropriety of their signing that requisition, and foresaw as little the offence it would give, as the high sheriff himself. And as to the Catholics, in their disqualified situation, they could not with either prudence or propriety follow any other line but that of a strict neutrality in a political question, on which neither the friends nor opponents of a parliamentary reform would acknowledge them competent to determine.
This tamed tone will not fail to strike on comparing it with his intrepid letter[584] written not two years before.
Meanwhile the National Congress was announced to hold its first meeting. 'Whatever underhand engines may endeavour to effect,' says the popular organ, 'we hope to see these just and constitutional deliberations re-establish the purity of representation.'[585]
One prime object of the Castle is detected and denounced by the same courageous journalist, John Magee. The 'Dublin Evening Post' of November 5, 1784, records:—
The borough-ridden Government, disappointed in its impotent attempts to prevent the laudable exertion of the people in prosecuting a Parliamentary Reform, and finding that even the venal knaves of the Castle nauseate the fulsome charges so long run on Binns and Tandy, has directed the venal writers, as the last effort of an expiring and despairing cause, to endeavour to sow those seeds of dissension which so long desolated this divided Kingdom, and set father against son, and brother against brother, that all might become the easy slaves of foreign tyranny.[586]
These extracts do not criminate O'Leary, but are useful as illustrating the history of the time, and developing secret policy, while, moreover, they correct some strange inaccuracies. For instance: the Viceroy, writing to Sydney, as printed in Mr. Lecky's History, calls Tandy's colleague 'Binney.' Of course it should be Binns, a name frequently found in the dark records of '98.
The Castle scribe, in another paragraph, states of Binns and Tandy, both thoroughly honest men—'Fame is very busy that they have received the all-subduing touch of "aurum mirabile."' This was probably to divert suspicion from the really subsidised quarter. It will be remembered that the date of O'Leary's arrival, and that of Parker, quite tallies with the meeting on the 27th September; and it may be asked what else could have brought the popular orators to Dublin at that juncture? Parker knew Tandy, and, as Orde remarks, might be 'able to dive to the bottom of his secrets.'
While diplomacy sought to work its ends in one quarter, brute force laboured in another to disable the arm which had been upraised. The Sheriff of the County Dublin having convened his bailiwick to meet on the subject of Reform, Fitzgibbon, then Attorney-General, addressed an unconstitutional letter to him threatening to proceed by attachment against those who responded to his call. The sheriff himself was fined and imprisoned.