y was not extirpated by the events of 1848,
although as a public organized body, suppressed. Its writers continued
to write, although there was little public speaking. Charles Gavan
Duffy, more fortunate than his fellows, was enabled to escape the legal
penalties attached to his undoubted treason; juries would not convict,
notwithstanding the plainest evidence. The Roman Catholics in the juries
were obstinate in refusing a conviction. This circumstance deepened the
general distrust existing among Protestants in the fidelity of Roman
Catholic jurors on any question in which they took a political or
ecclesiastical interest. There is no reason, however, to suppose that
this spirit of inequitable partizanship was confined to Roman Catholics.
Such incidents never justified the government in refusing them
alterations in the jury laws, popularly demanded, and in exercising
so sternly the right of challenge which belonged to the crown in such
prosecutions. Mr. Duffy resumed his place at the office of the _Nation_
newspaper, affecting to believe that there was no hope of achieving what
he called Irish independence by political agitation; that the country
needed material improvement in the first instance, and that in
proportion as it increased in wealth would it be likely to obtain a
national existence. Mitchell, in his exile, denounced this doctrine;
and when he afterwards escaped to the United States, he impugned these
opinions of Mr. Duffy as dangerous to freedom, and as a cover to
his retreat from the patriotic advocacy of Irish nationality. The
recriminations of these two champions of Young Irelandism showed what
little prospect there ever had been of any harmony existing in an Irish
provisional government, if success had attended the efforts of these
men. Mr. Duffy, while for a time persisting in his new course, and
making his paper more an organ of the ultramontane priesthood, took
every opportunity of inciting the people to treason, at first covertly,
but gradually in a more open manner. This the government permitted, to
the disparagement of the loyal, and the injury of peace and improvement
in Ireland. The Old Ireland party continued to agitate, but their
agitation assumed still more of a sectarian character. Yet the name of
O'Connell had lost much of its spell, and at an auction of his library
in Dublin, his books, even with his autograph, barely fetched the prices
which the same volumes would have brought at any other pu