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 which Sir Robert Peel had inaugurated amid a storm of wrath from his former supporters, reminding one of the fury and disappointment of the higher and wealthy classes when Mr. Gladstone—­a still bolder reformer, although nursed and cradled in the tenets of monopolists—­introduced his measures for the relief of Ireland.