When, four years later, all England wept the death of Sir Robert Peel, a committee was formed to open among the working-classes a penny subscription for the purpose of erecting to him a "Poor Man's National Monument," and Mr. Cobden proposed that in its inscription should be inserted this last sentence of the speech with which the great minister closed his official

career.

A

CHAPTER IV.

IRELAND.

T the moment when the ministry of Sir Robert Peel went

out of office, famine was decimating the population of Ireland, and the Irish question agitated and distressed the sister kingdom. It was the culminating period of a long-continued anxiety and a constant solicitude. The Catholic emancipation had been lately accomplished, as was afterwards to be the trade reform, by the Tory leaders, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, marching at the head of the Whigs; and with this triumph of liberty and justice, it had been hoped that the violent passions which distracted Ireland would be appeased. Sir Robert Peel had never lost sight of the plan conceived by Mr. Pitt, when, in 1800, he had accomplished the union of the two countries. The emancipation of the Roman Catholics, a fixed endowment assured by the State to the clergy of that faith, and the establishment of public institutions in which they might receive the education which either they now lacked or were forced to seek upon the Continent, were the three measures by means of which it was believed that the union of England and Ireland would be made genuine and effectual. Under the lead of Mr. O'Connell and his agitators, Ireland now demanded something very different: she claimed the repeal of the union itself, and, for the future, her own Parliament once more, and an independent national existence.

The task before the sincere friends of Ireland was most severe. They had to reconstitute the whole system of society,

and at the same time undo the results of all her history. Out-of a mass of victors and vanquished, differing in race, religion, and speech, and after centuries of war or oppression, there must be made a nation of citizens, free and equal, and submissive to government like their neighbors of England and Scotland. All the successive Cabinets which had attempted this task, since the time of Mr. Pitt, had, like him, been deceived in respect to the difficulties of the work; they had sowed broadcast hopes and promises. The Irish troubles had become for England a grave danger; her miseries oppressed the English with a weight of remorse. Animated with an ardent desire to bring to an end this unhappy condition of affairs, they deceived themselves as they did the people of Ireland in respect to the value of their measures, and the efficacy of their promises. The effect of centuries of tyranny cannot be abolished in a day; a people cannot be regenerated by a few laws. The more hopes were held out to Ireland, the more that unhappy country became exasperated at her repeated disappointments. "The union," said Mr. O'Connell, "ought to have been the amalgamation of the two countries, the identification of the two islands. There should have been no rights or privileges for the one that should not have been communicated to the other. The franchise should have been the same, all corporate rights the same, every civic privilege identical. Cork should have no more difference from Kent than York from Lancashire. That ought to have been the union. That was Mr. Pitt's object." The union had not as yet borne these fruits; the condition of Ireland had never rendered them possible. O'Connell urged the repeal of the union. "The year 1843 shall be the repeal year," he said.

For many years O'Connell governed Ireland, holding all hearts in his powerful hand, swayed by his eloquence and his ardent patriotism. He had sustained the Whig ministry, while often reviling its chiefs, and the agitation that he had fomented