transformations of society to follow on possible reforms, there is
not even in these dreamy schemes the same amazing disproportion of
means to be employed and end to be attained as characterised the
Chartist delusion.

[Illustration: Daniel O'Connell.]

In Ireland men were reposing unbounded faith in another sort of
political panacea for every personal and social evil--the Repeal of
the Union with England, advocated by Daniel O'Connell, with all the
power of his passionate Celtic eloquence, and supported by all his
extraordinary personal influence. Apparently he hoped to carry this
agitation to the same triumphant issue as that for Catholic
emancipation, in which he had taken a conspicuous part; but the new
movement did not, like the old one, appeal immediately and plausibly
to the English sense of fair play and natural justice. A competent
and not unfriendly observer has remarked that O'Connell's "theory and
policy were that Ireland was to be saved by a dictatorship entrusted
to himself." Whether any salvation for the unhappy land did lie in
such a dictatorship was a point on which opinion might well be
divided. English opinion was massively hostile to it; but for years
all the political enthusiasm of Ireland centred in O'Connell and the
cause he upheld. The country might be on the brink of ruin and
starvation, but the peril seemed forgotten while the dream lasted.
The agitator was wont to refer to the Queen in terms of extravagant
loyalty, and it would seem that the feeling was largely shared by his
followers. However futile and vainglorious his scheme and methods may
appear, we must not deny to him a distinction, rare indeed among
Irish agitators, of having steadily disclaimed violence and advocated
orderly and peaceable proceedings. He thought his cause would be
injured, and not advanced, by such outrages as before and since his
day have too often disgraced party warfare in Ireland. His favourite
maxim was that "the man who commits a crime gives strength to the
enemy." This opinion was not heartily endorsed by all his followers.
When it became clear that his dislike of physical force was real,
when he did not defy the Government, at last stirred into hostile
action by the demonstrations he organised, there was an end of his
power over the fiercer spirits whom he had roused against the rule of
"the Saxon"--luckless phrase with which he had enriched the
Anglo-Irish controversy, and misleading as luckless. O'Connell died,
a broken and disappointed man, on his way to Rome in 1847; but the
spirit he had raised and could not rule did not die with him, and the
younger, more turbulent leaders, who had outbid him for popular
approval, continued their anti-English warfare with growing zeal
until the year of fate 1848.

Even the Principality of Wales had its own peculiar form of
agitation, sometimes accompanied by outrage, during these wild
opening years. The farmers and labourers in Wales were unprosperous
and poor, and in the season of their adversity they found turnpikes
and tolls multiplying on their public roads. They resented what
appeared a cruel imposition with wrathful impatience, and ere long
gave expression to their anger in wild deeds. A text of Scripture
suggested to them a fantastic form of riot. They found that it was
said of old to Rebecca, "Let thy seed possess the gate of those which
hate them," and ere long "Rebecca and her children," men masking in
women's clothes, made fierce war by night on the "gates" they
detested, destroying the turnpikes and driving out their keepers.
These raids were not always bloodless. The Government succeeded in
repressing the rioting, and then, finding that a real grievance had
caused it, did away with the oppressive tolls, and dealt not too
hardly with the captured offenders; leniency which soon restored
Wales to tranquillity.

[Illustration: Richard Cobden.]

[Illustration: John Bright.]

A peaceful, strictly constitutional, and finally successful agitation
ran its steady course in England for several years contemporaneously
with those we have already enumerated. The Anti-Corn-Law League, with
which the names of Cobden and Bright are united as closely as those
two distinguished men were united in friendship, had in 1838 found a
centre eminently favourable to its operations in Manchester. Its
leaders were able, well-informed, and upright men, profoundly
convinced that their cause was just, and that the welfare of the
people was involved in their success or failure. They were men of the
middle class, acquainted intimately with the needs and doings of the
trading community to which they belonged, and therefore at once
better qualified to argue on questions affecting commerce, and less
directly interested in the prosperity of agriculture, than the more
aristocratic leaders of the nation. Both persuasive and successful
speakers, one of them supremely eloquent, they were able to interest
even the lowest populace in questions of political economy, and to
make Free Trade in Corn the idol of popular passion. Their mode of
agitation was eminently reasonable and wise; but it _was_ an
agitation, exciting wild enthusiasm and fierce opposition, and must
be reckoned not among the forces tending to quiet, but among those
that aroused anxious care in the first nine years of the reign. And
it was a terrible calamity that at last placed victory within their
grasp. The blight on the potato first showed itself in 1845--a new,
undreamed-of disaster, probably owing to the long succession of
unfavourable seasons. And the potato blight meant almost certainly
famine in Ireland, where perhaps three-fourths of the population had
no food but this root. The food supply of a whole nation seemed on
the point of being cut off. A loud demand was made for "the opening
of the ports." By existing laws the ports admitted foreign grain
tinder import duties varying in severity inversely with the
fluctuating price of home-grown grain; thus a certain high level in
the cost of corn was artificially maintained. These regulations,