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rates resolutely set their faces; and in the next place, while prescribing to themselves nothing but peaceful and legal means for the accomplishment of their object, they scouted the ridiculous doctrine, that "liberty was not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood," and that circumstances might arise under which resort to the arbitration of the sword would be righteous and justifiable. In time, however, the Confederates took up a bolder and more dangerous position. As early as May, 1846, Lord John Russell spoke of the men who wrote in the pages of the _Nation_, and who subsequently became the leaders of the Confederation, "as a party looking to disturbance as its means, and having separation from England as its object." The description was false at the time, but before two years had elapsed its application became more accurate. A few men there were like Mitchel, who from the birth of the Confederation, and perhaps before it, abandoned all expectation of redress through the medium of Constitutional agitation; but it was not until the flames of revolution had wrapped the nations of the Continent in their fiery folds--until the barricades were up in every capital from Madrid to Vienna--and until the students' song of freedom was mingled with the paean of victory on many a field of death--that the hearts of the Irish Confederates caught the flame, and that revolution, and revolution alone, became the goal of their endeavours. When Mitchel withdrew from the Confederation in March, 1848, the principles of constitutional action were still in the ascendancy; when he rejoined it a month later, the cry "to the registries," was superseded by fiery appeals summoning the people to arms. In the first week of April, the doctrine which John Mitchel had long been propounding, found expression in the leading columns of the _Nation_:--"Ireland's necessity," said Duffy, "demands the desperate remedy of revolution." A few weeks later, the same declaration was made in the very citadel of the enemy's power. It was O'Brien who spoke, and his audience was the British House of Commons. With Messrs. Meagher and Hollywood, he had visited Paris to present an address of congratulation on behalf of the Irish people to the Republican government; and on taking his seat in the House of Commons after his return, he found himself charged by the Ministers of the Crown, with having gone to solicit armed intervention from France on behalf of the disaffec
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