made, and a Tenant League Conference assembled in Dublin.  Of this league the remnants of the “Young Ireland” party formed the nucleus, but were supplemented by others with widely different aims and intentions.  Of these others the two Sadleirs, John and James, Mr. Edmund O’Flaherty, and Mr. William Keogh, afterwards Judge Keogh, were the most prominent.  These with their adherents constituted the once famous “Brass Band” which for several years filled Parliament with its noisy declamations, and which posed as the specially appointed champion of Catholicism.  In 1853 several of its members took office under Lord Aberdeen, but their course was not a long one.  A bank kept in Ireland by the two Sadleirs broke, ruining an enormous number of people, and on investigation was found to have been fraudulently conducted from the very beginning.  John Sadleir thereupon killed himself; his brother James was expelled from the House of Commons, and he and several others implicated in the swindle fled the country and never reappeared, and so the “Brass Band” broke up, amid the well-deserved contempt of men of every shade of political opinion.

After this succeeded a prolonged lull.  Secret agitations, however, were still working underground, and as early as 1850 one known as the Phoenix organization began to collect recruits, although for a long time its proceedings attracted little or no attention.

In 1859 several of its members were arrested, and it seemed then to die down and disappear, but some years later it sprang up again with a new name, and the years 1866 and 1867 were signalized by the Fenian rising, or to put it with less dignity, the Fenian scare.  With the close of the American War a steady backward stream of Americanized Irishmen had set in, and a belief that war between England and America was rapidly approaching had become an article of fervent faith with a large majority in Ireland.  The Fenian plan of operation was a two-headed one.  There was to be a rising in Ireland, and there was to be a raid into Canada across the American frontier.  Little formidable as either project seems now, at the time they looked serious enough, and had the strained relations then existing between England and America turned out differently, no one can say but what they might have become so.  The Fenian organization, which grew out of the earlier Phoenix one, was managed from centres, a man called Stephens being the person who came most prominently before the world in the capacity of Head centre.  In 1865 Stephens was arrested in Dublin, but managed to escape not long afterwards from Richmond prison by the aid of two confederates within its walls.  The following May, 1866, a small body of Fenians crossed the Niagara river, but the United States authorities rigidly enforced the neutrality of the American frontier, and so the attempt perished.  The same spring a rising broke out in Ireland, but it also was stamped with failure from its onset, and the famous snowstorm of that year finished the discomfiture of its adherents.