to the Secretary, the subscribers had the privilege of naming two weekly or one evening paper, which the Secretary was to forward and pay for.  By the second rule, adopted after the State trials, the subscribers retained the drawback, and selected and paid for their own paper.  For several weeks, the Nation was the only theme of Mr. O’Connell’s abhorrence.  He exhausted all his eloquence in warning the people against it, but in vain.  The people continued to insist on it in return for their subscriptions.  Accordingly, on the 10th of August, a resolution was proposed to the effect that no money subscribed for Repeal Purposes should be allocated to the payment of a subscription for the Nation, on the sole ground that, in 1843, it inculcated doctrines which were in their tendency treasonable.  Mr. O’Connell said, after the resolution was passed, that he did not wish to injure the paper in a pecuniary point of view; and on the next day of meeting, he brought down to the Association some twenty law authorities, which he read, to prove that treason had actually been committed; and thus stamped the conduct of the Attorney-General as not alone justifiable, but lenient to excess.

The seceders determined to abide the issue.  They had the fullest confidence that the insensate cry raised against them would eventually subside, and that truth would again prevail.  They contented themselves, therefore, with appealing to their countrymen, through the columns of the Nation, then interdicted and banned through every parish in the island.  But, in those appeals, there was no word of allusion to the storm of calumny and denunciation then raging against them.  They sought to fix public attention on subjects of vast national importance, and to awake the energies of the people to some becoming effort where the stake was their lives.  Meantime, week after week, the Government was praised, the Board of Works were praised, and the people—­“the faithful and moral people, who died, peacefully, of hunger”—­were praised, in the Repeal Association.

[Illustration:  Robert Holmes (1848)]

Late in the autumn of 1846, some men, few in number and humble in condition, undertook the desperate task of remonstrating with the Repeal Association.  Among them, Mr. Keeley and Mr. Holywood, Mr. Crean and Mr. Halpin, were prominent.  Their undertaking was gigantic, considering the formidable obstacles they proposed to encounter.  They proceeded silently and sedulously; and, in a few weeks, a remonstrance against the course pursued by the Association was signed by fifteen hundred citizens of Dublin.  It was presented to the Chairman of the Association on the 24th of October, and ordered by Mr. J. O’Connell to be flung into the gutter.  The remonstrants and the public resented this indignity alike.  It was determined to hold a meeting in the Rotunda, where they proposed to defend themselves against every species of assault.  The meeting was held on the