The whole movement in fact was, in the first instance, a literary quite as much as a political one.  Nearly all who took part in it—­Gavan Duffy, John Mitchell, Meagher, Dillon, Davis himself—­were very young men, many fresh from college, all filled with zeal for the cause of liberty and nationality.  The graver side of the movement only showed itself when the struggle with O’Connell began.  At first no idea of deposing, or even seriously opposing the great leader seems to have been intended.  The attempt on O’Connell’s part to carry a formal declaration against the employment under any circumstances of physical force was the origin of that division, and what the younger spirits considered “truckling to the Whigs” helped to widen the breach.  When, too, O’Connell had partially retired into the background, his place was filled by his son, John O’Connell, the “Head conciliator,” between whom and the “Young Irelanders” there waged a fierce war, which in the end led to the indignant withdrawal of the latter from the Repeal council.

Before matters reached this point, the younger camp had been strengthened by the adhesion of Smith O’Brien, who, though not a man of much intellectual calibre, carried no little weight in Ireland.  His age—­which compared to that of the other members of his party, was that of a veteran—­his rank and position as a county member, above all, his vaunted descent from Brian Boroimhe, all made him an ally and a convert to be proud of.  Like the rest he had no idea at first of appealing to physical force, however loudly an abstract resolution against it might be denounced.  Resistance was to be kept strictly within the constitutional limits, indeed the very year of his junction with this the extreme left of the Repeal party, Smith O’Brien’s most violent proceeding was to decline to sit upon a railway committee to which he had been summoned, an act of contumacy for which he was ordered by the House of Commons into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms, and committed to an extemporized prison, by some cruelly declared to be the coal-hole.  “An Irish leader in a coal-hole!” exclaims Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, indignantly, can more unworthy statement be conceived?  “Regullus in a barrel, however,” he adds, rather grandly, “was not quite the last one heard of Rome and its affairs!”

In Ireland matters were certainly sad enough and serious enough without any such serio-comic incidents.  Famine was already stalking the country with giant strides, and no palliative measures as yet proposed seemed to be of the slightest avail.  Early in January, 1847, O’Connell left on that journey of his which was never completed, and by the middle of May Ireland was suddenly startled by the news that her great leader was dead.

The effect of his death was to produce a sudden and immense reaction.  A vast revulsion of love and reverence sprang up all over the country; an immense sense of his incomparable services, and with it a vehement anger against all who had opposed him.  Upon the “Young Ireland” party, as was inevitable, the weight of that anger fell chiefly, and from the moment of O’Connell’s death whatever claim they had to call themselves a national party vanished utterly.  The men “who killed the Liberator” could never again hope to carry with them the suffrages of any number of their countrymen.