they substituted arson and murder for threats and bullying, and they made life intolerable by their reckless brutality.  It was impossible to convict them, for the hatred against an informer, inbred in every Irishman through generations of experience in Ireland, united with fear in keeping competent witnesses from the courts.  Finally the president of one of the large coal companies employed James McParlan, a remarkably clever Irish detective.  He joined the Mollies, somehow eluded their suspicions, and slowly worked his way into their confidence.  An unusually brutal and cowardly murder in 1875 proved his opportunity.  When the courts finished with the Mollies, nineteen of their members had been hanged, a large number imprisoned, and the organization was completely wiped out.

Meantime the Fenian movement served to keep the Irish in the public eye.  This was no less than an attempt to free Ireland and disrupt the British Empire, using the United States as a fulcrum, the Irish in America as the power, and Canada as the lever.  James Stephens, who organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood, came to America in 1858 to start a similar movement.  After the Civil War, which supplied a training school for whole regiments of Irish soldiers, a convention of Fenians was held at Philadelphia in 1865 at which an “Irish Republic” was organized, with a full complement of officers, a Congress, a President, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Secretary of War, in fact, a replica of the American Federal Government.  It assumed the highly absurd and dangerous position that it actually possessed sovereignty.  The luxurious mansion of a pill manufacturer in Union Square, New York, was transformed into its government house, and bonds, embellished with shamrocks and harps and a fine portrait of Wolfe Tone, were issued, payable “ninety days after the establishment of the Irish Republic.”  Differences soon arose, and Stephens, who had made his escape from Richmond, near Dublin, where he had been in prison, hastened to America to compose the quarrel which had now assumed true Hibernian proportions.  An attempt to land an armed gang on the Island of Campo Bello on the coast of New Brunswick was frustrated; invaders from Vermont spent a night over the Canadian border before they were driven back; and for several days Fort Erie on Niagara River was held by about 1500 Fenians.[23] General Meade was thereupon sent by the Federal authorities to put an end to these ridiculous breaches of neutrality.

Neither Meade nor any other authority, however, could stop the flow of Fenian adjectives that now issued from a hundred indignation meetings all over the land when Canada, after due trial, proceeded to sentence the guilty culprits captured in the “Battle of Limestone Ridge,” as the tussle with Canadian regulars near Fort Erie was called.  Newspapers abounded with tales of the most startling designs upon Canada and Britain.  There then occurred a strong reaction to the Fenian movement, and the American people were led to wonder how much of truth there was in a statement made by Thomas D’Arcy McGee.[24] “This very Fenian organization in the United States,” he said, “what does it really prove but that the Irish are still an alien population, camped but not settled in America, with foreign hopes and aspirations, unshared by the people among whom they live?”