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