ot been confined to writers of the stamp of Mr.
O'Brien. A striking instance of it is furnished by a recent American
biography. Among the early Fenian conspirators was a young man named
John Boyle O'Reilly. He was a genuine enthusiast, with a real vein of
literary talent; in the closing years of his life he won the affection
and admiration of very honourable men, and I should certainly have no
wish to look too harshly on youthful errors which were the result of a
misguided enthusiasm if they had been acknowledged as such. As a matter
of fact, however, he began his career by an act which, according to
every sound principle of morality, religion, and secular honour, was in
the highest degree culpable. Being a sworn Fenian, he entered a regiment
of hussars, assumed the uniform of the Queen, and took the oath of
allegiance for the express purpose of betraying his trust and seducing
the soldiers of his regiment. He was detected and condemned to penal
servitude, and he at last escaped to America, where he took an active
part in the Fenian movement. After his death his biography was written
in a strain of unqualified eulogy, but the biographer has honestly and
fully disclosed the facts which I have related. This book has an
introduction written by Cardinal Gibbons, one of the most prominent
Catholic divines in the United States. The reader may be curious to see
how the act of aggravated treachery and perjury which it revealed was
judged by a personage who occupies all but the highest position in a
Church which professes to be the supreme and inspired teacher of morals.
Not a word in this Introduction implies that O'Reilly had done any act
for which he should be ashamed. He is described as 'a great and good
man,' and the only allusion to his crime is in the following terms: 'In
youth his heart agonises over that saddest and strangest romance in all
history--the wrongs and woes of his motherland--that Niobe of the
Nations. In manhood, because he dared to wish her free, he finds himself
a doomed felon, an exiled convict, in what he calls himself the Nether
World.... The Divine faith implanted in his soul in childhood flourished
there undyingly, pervaded his whole being with its blessed influences,
furnished his noblest ideals of thought and conduct.... The country of
his adoption vies with the land of his birth in testifying to the
uprightness of his life.... With all these voices I blend my own, and in
their name I say that the wo