it seemed a more probable result that either the meeting would be allowed to proceed, or it would be illegally dispersed in the usual way by reading the Riot Act.  Even if the weight of conjecture were the other way, the consequences should be risked rather than falsify the national pledge.  To recede was cowardice; not the vulgar cowardice arising from personal weakness, but the moral cowardice which shrinks from an imperious obligation, because it is perilous.  The meeting should be held; every possible precaution should be taken to prevent an armed conflict.  If Power, drunk with its own advantage, risked an outrage, the people should be taught to yield; but only to yield with the purpose of entering a court of law, as prosecutors and avengers.  Even if worse consequences ensued after every effort to prevent them had been exhausted, the issue should be left to God.  Recriminations, painfully petty in their nature, followed.  The Government were charged with a premeditated design to commit wide and indiscriminate slaughter, and the weakness, in which were shrouded deep national shame and guilt, was made matter of indecent boast.  The Government, aware of the unexpected advantage, followed up the blow.  Mr. O’Connell took shelter in the sacredness of the Hall, which, he imagined, he had guarded against the encroachments of arbitrary power, and thither they followed him.  Having abandoned a position where he could act on the offensive, he was forced to contend against the aggressive attacks of Government flushed with its first success.

The trial that followed already occupies a large space in history.  Its effects were immediate and disastrous.  The personnel of the accused assumed the nation’s place.  Exhortations full of intense eloquence were addressed to the people from which the question of the country’s deliverance was entirely excluded.  Technicalities of law absorbed the attention which was due to Liberty.  A demurrer, a motion in abatement, or in arrest of judgment, was canvassed with a deeper interest by the people of the provinces than by even the distinguished Bar, which were arrayed on either side.  Mr. O’Connell’s infallibility in law engaged the anxious solicitude, the pride, the passions of Ireland.  Yet throughout that long trial the question which would test it was not mooted.  The indictment was a subtle net-work, which excluded such argument.  The objections to the indictment also were objections of form merely, and the final issue upon which the judgment was reversed was not even remotely connected with the main enquiry, whether or not the charge of conspiracy was sustainable in point of constitutional law.  During the progress of the trial, a fraud, a swindle, a petty theft, was perpetrated by the officers of government, which more than one man, high in office, had a hand in suborning.  This fact had supreme influence on the decision of the House of Lords.  But the plain truth is, the judgment was reversed as an essential move in a great party game.