he no
longer led.

It was soon after Peel's retirement from office that O'Connell, too,
made his last speech in the House of Commons, not as formerly in
trumpet tones, but with enfeebled voice. "I am afraid," said the
fainting athlete, "that the House is not sufficiently aware of the
extent of the misery in Ireland. I do not think that members understand
the accumulated miseries under which the people are at present
suffering. It has been estimated that five thousand adults and ten
thousand children have already perished with famine, and that
twenty-five per cent of the whole population will perish, unless the
House will afford effective relief. I assure the House most solemnly
that I am not exaggerating; I can establish all that I have said by many
and painful proofs. And the necessary result must be typhus fever, which
in fact has already broken out, and is desolating whole districts; it
leaves alive only one in ten of those whom it attacks." This appeal
doubtless had its effect in demonstrating the absolute need of a repeal
of the corn laws. But it is as the "liberator" of the Roman Catholic
population of Ireland in the great emancipation struggle,--triumphantly
concluded as early as 1829,--and the incessant labors after that for the
enlargement of Irish conditions, that O'Connell will be remembered.
"Honor, glory, and eternal gratitude," exclaimed Lacordaire, "to the man
who collected in his powerful hand the scattered elements of justice and
deliverance, and who, pushing them to their logical conclusions with a
vigorous patience which thirty years could not exhaust, at last poured
on his country the unhoped-for delight of liberty of conscience, and
thus deserved not only the title of Liberator of his Country but the
oecumenical title of Liberator of his Church."

O'Connell, Cobden, and Sir Robert Peel,--what great names in the history
of England in the agitating period between the passage of the Reform
Bill and that of the repeal of the corn laws! I could add other
illustrious names,--especially those of Brougham and Lord John Russell;
but the sun of glory around the name of the first was dimmed after his
lord chancellorship, while that of the latter was yet to blaze more
brightly when he assumed the premiership on the retirement of his great
predecessor, with such able assistants as Lord Palmerston, Earl Grey,
Macaulay, and others. These men, as Whigs, carried out more fully the
liberal and economic measures whi