and wealth, murmured as they heard their treachery laid bare and their designs dissected in the impassioned appeals by which Meagher sought to recall them to the path of patriotism and duty.  It was necessary for their ends that the bold denouncer of corruption, and the men who acted with him, should be driven from the association; and to effect that object O’Connell was hounded on to the step which ended in the secession.  The “peace resolutions” were introduced, and Meagher found himself called on to subscribe to a doctrine which his soul abhorred—­that the use of arms was at all times unjustifiable and immoral.  The Lord Mayor was in the chair, and O’Brien, John O’Connell.  Denis Reilly, Tom Steele, and John Mitchel had spoken, when Meagher rose to address the assembly.  The speech he delivered on that occasion, for brilliancy and lyrical grandeur has never been surpassed.  It won for him a reception far transcending that of Shiel or O’Connell as an orator; and it gave to him the title by which he was afterwards so often referred to—­“Meagher of the Sword.”  He commenced by expressing his sense of gratitude, and his attachment to O’Connell, “My lord,” he said:—­

“I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters off my limbs while I was yet a child, and by whose influence my father, the first Catholic that did so for two hundred years, sat for the last two years in the civic chair of my native city.  But, my lord,” he continued, “the same God who gave to that great man the power to strike down one odious ascendency in this country, and who enabled him to institute in this land the laws of religious equality—­the same God gave to me a mind that is my own, a mind that has not been mortgaged to the opinion of any man or set of men, a mind that I was to use and not surrender.”

Having thus vindicated freedom of opinion, the speaker went on to disclaim for himself the opinion that the Association ought to deviate from the strict path of legality.  But he refused to accept the resolutions; because he said “there are times when arms alone will suffice, and when political ameliorations call for ‘a drop of blood,’ and for many thousand drops of blood.”  Then breaking forth into a strain of impassioned and dazzling oratory he proceeded:—­

“The soldier is proof against an argument—­but he is not proof against a bullet.  The man that will listen to reason—­let him be reasoned with.  But it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can alone prevail against battalioned despotism.

“Then, my lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it profane to say that the King of Heaven—­the Lord of Hosts! the God of Battles!—­bestows his benediction upon those who unsheath the sword in the hour of a nation’s peril.  From that evening on which, in the valley of Bethulia, he nerved the arm of the Jewish girl to smite the drunken tyrant in his tent, down to this our day,