result was that between sixty and seventy members of Parliament and some
forty peers pledged themselves to endeavour to secure united action
upon measures regarding Ireland in the new session. On the 14th of
January, 1847, the Irish landlord class held such a muster as had not
been seen since the Union. "Nearly twenty peers, more than thirty
members of Parliament, and at least six hundred gentlemen of name and
station took part in it. The meeting called on Government to prohibit
export of food stuffs and to sacrifice any sum that might be required to
save the lives of the people." It passed thirty resolutions without
dissension; and then some one asked what was to be done if the
Government refused to adopt any of their suggestions. Would Irish
members then unite to vote against the Government? To this, Irish
members refused to pledge themselves, and Moore, as he said afterwards,
"saw at a glance that the confederacy had broken down."

That was the end of the revolt of the Irish gentry. It was really the
decisive moment of their failure; disorganised and futile, they went
down by scores in the ruin of the Encumbered Estates Court, while their
tenants were marking with their bones a road across the Atlantic. As for
the landlords who were popular leaders, within a few months after that
great assembly, Daniel O'Connell, who had proposed the first resolution,
died in Rome, heart-broken. A few months more and Smith O'Brien, the
mover of another resolution, headed a rebellion in sheer despair.

Smith O'Brien had twenty years of parliamentary life behind him when he
was driven to the wild protest of insurrection. Twenty years of the same
experience were to bring Moore to a very similar attitude; but in 1847
Moore was hopeful of building up in Parliament the nucleus of an
Independent Irish Party. When the dissolution came, in 1847, he stood
for a second time, but as an Independent, and his work in the famine
times carried at least its recognition. Every single elector who went to
the poll gave one of his two votes to the Independent. He went to
Westminster and denounced with equal energy the agrarian murders, which
were then rife in Ireland, and those organs of publicity in England
which sought to magnify these outrages into an indictment against the
Irish nation. The ferment of indignation against English methods had not
yet died out in the hearts of Irish landlords. Lord Sligo, writing to
Moore concerning the controversy whic