I have long wished to meet Mr. O’Leary, who sent me, through a correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the Irish case, which had charmed me in. the paper.  Now that “Conservative” Englishmen have come to treat the main points of Chartism almost as commonplaces in politics, it is surely time for them to recognise the honesty and integrity of the spirit which revolted in the Ireland of 1848 against the then seemingly hopeless condition of that country.  Of that spirit Mr. O’Leary is a living, earnest, and most interesting incarnation.  He strikes one at once as a much younger man in all that makes the youth of the intellect and the emotions than any Nationalist M.P. of half his years whom I have ever met.  No Irishman living has dealt stronger or more open blows than he against the English dominion in Ireland.  Born in Tipperary, where he inherited a small property in houses, he was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, and while a student there was drawn into the “Young Ireland” party mainly by the poems of Thomas Davis.  Late in the electrical year of the “battle summer,” 1848, he was arrested on suspicion of being concerned in a plot to rescue Smith O’Brien and other state prisoners.  The suspicion was well founded, but could not be established, and after a day or two he was liberated.  From Trinity, after this, he went to the Queen’s College in Cork, where he took his degree, and studied medicine.  When the Fenian movement became serious, after the close of our American Civil War, O’Leary threw himself into it with Stephens, Luby, and Charles Kickham.  Stephens appointed him one of the chief organisers of the I.E.B. with Luby and Kickham, and he took charge of the Irish People—­the organ of the Fenians of 1865.  It was as a subordinate contributor to this journal that Sir William Harcourt’s familiar Irish bogy, O’Donovan Rossa[26], was arrested together with his chief, Mr. O’Leary, and with Kickham in 1865, and found guilty, with them, after a trial before Mr. Justice Keogh, of treason-felony.  The speech then delivered by Mr. O’Leary in the dock made a profound impression upon the public mind in America.  It was the speech, not of a conspirator, but of a patriot.  The indignation with which he repelled for himself and for his associate Luby the charges levelled at them both, without a particle of supporting evidence, by the prosecuting counsel, of aiming at massacre and plunder, was its most salient feature.  The terrible sentence passed upon him, of penal servitude for twenty years, Mr. O’Leary accepted with a calm dignity, which I am glad, for the sake of Irish manhood, to find that his friends here now recall with pride, when their ears are vexed by the shrill and clamorous complaints of more recent “patriots,” under the comparatively trivial punishments which they invite.