e departments suited to their different
capacities, and varying from the post of tide-waiter, to that of
stipendiary magistrate. Fierce was the struggle which followed, and sore
the disappointment, and many a scalding tear of baffled ambition watered
the way to the aspirant's ruin.

This is not said for the purpose of disparaging the legitimate ambition
of those who sought advancement in the altered circumstances and
sentiments of the time. But the effect of such a state of things on the
morality of the nation was incalculably injurious. The most solemn
resolution was openly violated, and that by the very men who were
foremost in recommending the national vow. Nor would its tendency be
less fatal, assuming that Mr. O'Connell was correct in supposing that
the experiment would be vain, and that its failure could not fail to
supply new and more urgent reasons for the nation's independence. The
compact, if even entered into with that view, would shake all faith in
public men; because it would only change the parties with whom a false
obligation was contracted, leaving the obligation itself and its
violation exactly where they were.

Mr. O'Connell's support was doomed to be as fatal to the Whigs as his
opposition. He unhappily assisted them during his period to carry one
measure, against which they had recorded several solemn decisions in
Parliament, namely, the Tithe Bill, without an appropriation clause,
which was a direct falsification of their own resolution, whereby they
defeated Sir Robert Peel's short-lived administration, in 1835. And what
was still more lamentable, he supported them in renewing in a modified
form the very Coercion Act for the introduction of which he designated
them as "_base, bloody and brutal_."

But other elements were secretly sapping the influences for which he
made these sacrifices. The storm of disaffection, a long while gathering
among open foes and disappointed retainers, was about to burst on the
devoted heads of the Whigs. With their accustomed fickleness and
treachery of character they prepared to sacrifice, for the sake of
power, the man whom they conciliated and deceived in the same hope of
retaining it. If he foresaw that this would be the result of his
experiment, never was augury more fully realised. Whatever may be the
exact engagements of the Whigs, he was able to allege that not one was
fulfilled, while he was in a position to prove that he more than kept
his own: unless indee