uffy, and Davis played their part in England as
well as in Ireland. Father Mathew founded the Temperance, as Feargus
O'Conor the Chartist, movement. And there was an orator who
fascinated Gladstone--Sheil.

Father Mathew succeeded in keeping many millions of men sober during
the forties until the great Famine engulfed his work as it did
O'Connell's. To him is due, as a feature of Irish life, the brass
band with banners, which he originally organized as a
counter-intoxicant.

Feargus O'Conor founded Radical Socialism in England. As the Lion of
Freedom, he enjoyed a popularity with English workmen approaching
that of O'Connell in Ireland. He ended in lunacy, but he had the
credit of forwarding peasant proprietorship far in advance of his
times.

Sheil was a tragic orator--"an iambic rhapsodist", O'Connell called
him--who might have been leader, did not a greater tragedian occupy
the stage. And Sheil was content to be O'Connell's organizer. Without
O'Connell's voice or presence, he was his rhetorical superior,
excelling in irony and the by-plays of speech for which O'Connell was
too exuberant. Shell's speeches touch exquisite though not the deep
notes of O'Connell, whom he criticized for "throwing out broods of
sturdy young ideas upon the world without a rag to cover them." He
discredited his master and his cause by taking office. The fruits of
Emancipation were tempting to those who had borne the heat of the
day, but there was a rising school of patriots who refused
acquiescence to anything less than total freedom.

The Young Irelanders reincarnated the men of "ninety-eight." They
were neither too late nor too soon. They snatched the sacred torch of
Liberty from the dying hands of O'Connell, who summoned in vain old
Ireland against his young rivals. But men like Davis and Duffy
appealed to types O'Connell never swayed. He could carry the mob, but
poet, journalist, and idealist were enrolled with Young Ireland. For
this reason the history of their failure is brighter in literature
than the tale of O'Connell's triumphs. To read Duffy's "Young
Ireland" and Mitchel's "Jail Journal", with draughts from the _Spirit
of the Nation_. is to relive the period. Without the Young
Irelanders, Irish Nationalism might not have survived the Famine.

Mitchel, as open advocate of physical force, became father to
Fenianism. An honest conspirator and brilliant writer, he proved that
the pen of journalism was sharper than the Irish pike