The Triumph of Agitation. 5 



principles, because calculated to defeat his cause. The essence of 

 his system was deliberation, patience, obedience to the laws : the incen- 

 diary, the rioter, the factious, and lawless disappeared at his approach. 

 He controlled, he disciplined, he organised j concentrated the force of the 

 people, and suffered them not to dissipate their strength in unprofitable 

 skirmishes with power. His object was in the strictest degree conform- 

 able to the maxims of liberty, which have ever been recognized, at least 

 in theory, in this realm not to control the government illegally, but to 

 watch over it constitutionally : not to hinder, much less usurp, the func- 

 tions of parliament, even of a corrupt parliament, but to procure their 

 exercise on behalf of the country against a faction : not to inflame, not to 

 exasperate the people, but so to instruct them in their civil duties, so to 

 habituate them to political discussion, so to exhort them to defend their 

 rights, so to give force, steadiness, and due direction to their efforts, 

 cheering their spirits when they drooped, checking them when they 

 wantoned, ever keeping them up to the height of the constitution, ever 

 keeping them down to the level of the laws, that they, the people, as well 

 as the powers that issue out of the people, might discharge their proper 

 office in the commonwealth j and, not by the terror of their numbers, 

 but by the awe of their intelligence, their resolution, and their virtue, exert 

 a temperate, reasonable, august authority, to which monarchs might bow 

 without disparagement, and which senates might obey without dero- 

 gation. 



The Political Unions were so many colleges which cultivated and 

 taught the mighty science of securing all the benefits, and avoiding all 

 the evils, of a revolutionary movement. That science may now be said to 

 be a thoroughly digested system ; and this may be mentioned as one of 

 the advantages resulting from the long duration of the Reform struggle 

 advantages which, unless we are mistaken, are more than enough to 

 counterbalance its inconveniences. Had the contest been less protracted, 

 the people had been proportionally less acquainted with their own 

 strength ; their moral resources had been but imperfectly developed ; 

 their dependence on themselves would not have attained to that full 

 affiance, which, of all the elements of popular success, is the most 

 important, and in the strength of which they will now go on " conquer- 

 ing and to conquer j" the art of national organization would not have 

 been brought to its present maturity ; the magnificent scheme of abo- 

 lishing abuse, without rooting up the wheat along with the tares of 

 innovating after the fashion of Time, greatly yet quietly of obtaining 

 larger concessions, and more solid securities for freedom, by mild reforms, 

 than other nations, less fortunate, or less wise, have ever extorted by 

 fierce revolutions this noblest branch of practical philosophy, the rudi- 

 ments of which were first laid down in Ireland, of which O'Connell was 

 the father, and the Catholic Association the first school j this momentous 

 doctrine, whose first fruits were the liberties of a sect, whose latter 

 harvest has been the disenthralment of an empire, (an inestimable doc- 

 trine for the people of all nations, because containing the solution of the 

 great problem, how to obtain the greatest amount of freedom at the 

 smallest cost of disquiet and suffering) would not have been, what it now 

 is so thoroughly during a two years' struggle, has it been studied, ex- 

 plored, and so magnificently improved by repeated submission to experi- 

 ment a system so complete and consolidated, that it may well be called 



