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Temple of Somnauth, redeemed at Lord Ellenborough's or ders when Ghuznee was retaken by the English, was first received with incredulity as a practical joke; then with one universal burst of laughter; then with indignation; and then, again, when the natural anger had died away, with laughter again. "My brothers and my friends," wrote Lord Ellenborough "to all the princes, chiefs, and people of India,"

“Our victorious army bears the gates of the Temple of Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan Mahmoud looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee. The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged. The gates of the Temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory; the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus."

No words of pompous man could possibly have put together greater absurdities. The brothers and friends were Mohammedans and Hindoos, who were about as likely to agree as to the effect of these symbols of triumph as a Fenian and an Orangeman would be to fraternize in a toast to the glorious, pious, and immortal memory. To the Mohammedans the triumph of Lord Ellenborough was simply an insult. To the Hindoos the offer was ridiculous, for the Temple of Somnauth itself was in ruins, and the ground it. covered was trodden by Mohammedans. To finish the absurdity, the gates proved not to be genuine relics at all.

On October 1st, 1842, exactly four years since Lord Auckland's proclamation announcing and justifying the intervention to restore Shah Soojah, Lord Ellenborough issued another proclamation announcing the complete failure and the revocation of the policy of his predecessor. Lord Ellenborough declared that "to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British Government;" that, therefore, they would recognize any government approved by the Af ghans themselves; that the British arms would be withdrawn from Afghanistan, and that the Government of India would remain content with the limits nature appears to have assigned to its empire." Dost Mahomed was released from his captivity, and before long was ruler of Cabul once again. Thus ended the story of our expedition to reorganize the in

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ternal condition of Afghanistan. After four years of unpar alleled trial and disaster everything was restored to the condition in which we found it, except that there were so many brave Englishmen sleeping in bloody graves. The Duke of Wellington ascribed the causes of our failure to making war with a peace establishment; making war without a safe base of operations; carrying the native army out of India into a strange and cold climate; invading a poor country which was unequal to the supply of our wants; giving undue power to political agents; want of forethought and undue confidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir W. Macnaghten; placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible places; great military neglect and mismanagement after the outbreak. Doubtless these were, in a military sense, the reasons for the failure of an enterprise which cost the rev enues of India an enormous amount of treasure. But the causes of failure were deeper than any military errors could explain. It is doubtful whether the genius of a Napoleon and the forethought of a Wellington could have won any permanent success for an enterprise founded on so false and fatal a policy. Nothing in the ability or devotion of those intrusted with the task of carrying it out could have made it deserve success. Our first error of principle was to go completely out of our way for the purpose of meeting mere speculative dangers; our next and far greater error was made when we attempted, in the words of Lord Ellenborough's proclamation, to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people.

CHAPTER XII.

THE REPEAL YEAR.

"THE year 1843," said O'Connell, "is and shall be the great Repeal year." In the year 1843, at all events, O'Connell and his Repeal agitation are entitled to the foremost place. The character of the man himself well deserves some calm consideration. We are now, perhaps, in a condition to do it justice. We are far removed in sentiment and political association, if not exactly in years, from the time when O'Connell was the idol of one party, and the object of all the

bitterest scorn and hatred of the other. No man of his time was so madly worshipped and so fiercely denounced. No man in our time was ever the object of so much abuse in the newspapers. The fiercest and coarsest attacks that we can remember to have been made in English journals on Cobden and Bright during the heat of the Anti-Corn-law agitation seem placid, gentle, and almost complimentary when compared with the criticisms daily applied to O'Connell. The only vituperation which could equal in vehemence and scurrility that poured out upon O'Connell was that which O'Connell himself poured out upon his assailants. His hand was against every man, if every man's hand was against him. He asked for no quarter, and he gave none.

We have outlived not the times merely, but the whole spirit of the times, so far as political controversy is concerned. We are now able to recognize the fact that a public man may hold opinions which are distasteful to the majority, and yet be perfectly sincere and worthy of respect. We are well aware that a man may differ from us, even on vital questions, and yet be neither fool nor knave. But this view of things was not generally taken in the days of O'Connell's great agitation. He and his enemies alike acted in their controversies on the principle that a political opponent is necessarily a blockhead or a scoundrel. It is strange and somewhat melancholy to read the strictures of so enlightened a woman as Miss Martineau upon O'Connell. They are all based upon what a humorous writer has called the "fiendin-human-shape theory." Miss Martineau not merely assumes that O'Connell was absolutely insincere and untrustworthy, but discourses of him on the assumption that he was knowingly and purposely a villain. Not only does she hold that his Repeal agitation was an unqualified evil for his country, and that Repeal, if gained, would have been a curse to it, but she insists that O'Connell himself was thoroughly convinced of the facts. She devotes whole pages of lively and acrid argument to prove not only that O'Connell was ruining his country, but that he knew he was ruining it, and persevered in his wickedness out of pure self-seeking. No writer possessed of one-tenth of Miss Martineau's intellect and education would now reason after that fashion about any public man. If there is any common delusion of past

dayɛ which may be taken as entirely exploded now, it is the idea that any man ever swayed vast masses of people, and became the idol and the hero of a nation, by the strength of a conscious hypocrisy and imposture.

O'Connell in this Repeal year, as he called it, was by far the most prominent politician in these countries who had never been in office. He had been the patron of the Melbourne Ministry, and his patronage had proved baneful to it. One of the great causes of the detestation in which the Melbourne Whigs were held by a vast number of English people was their alleged subserviency to the Irish agitator. We cannot be surprised if the English public just then was little inclined to take an impartial estimate of O'Connell. He had attacked some of their public men in language of the fiercest denunciation. He had started an agitation which seemed as if it were directly meant to bring about a break-up of the Imperial system so lately completed by the Act of Union. He was opposed to the existence of the State Church in Ireland. He was the bitter enemy of the Irish landlord class of the landlords, that is to say, who took their title in any way from England. He was familiarly known in the graceful controversy of the time as the "Big Beggarman." It was an article of faith with the general public that he was enriching himself at the expense of a poor and foolish people. It is a matter of fact that he had given up a splendid practice at the bar to carry on his agitation; that he lost by the agitation, pecuniarily, far more than he ever got by it; that he had not himself received from first to last anything like the amount of the noble tribute so becomingly and properly given to Mr. Cobden, and so honorably accepted by him; and that he died poor, leaving his sons poor. Indeed, it is a remarkable evidence of the purifying nature of any great political cause, even where the object sought is but a phantom, that it is hardly possible to give a single instance of a great political agitation carried on in these countries and in modern times by leaders who had any primary purpose of making money. But at that time the general English public were firmly convinced that O'Connell was simply keeping up his agitation for the sake of pocketing "the rent." Some of the qualities, too, that specially endeared him to his Celtic countrymen made him

particularly objectionable to Englishmen; and Englishmen have never been famous for readiness to enter into the feelings and accept the point of view of other peoples. O'Connell was a thorough Celt. He represented all the impul siveness, the quick-changing emotions, the passionate, exaggerated loves and hatreds, the heedlessness of statement, the tendency to confound impressions with facts, the ebullient humor-all the other qualities that are especially characteristic of the Celt. The Irish people were the audience to which O'Connell habitually played. It may, indeed, be said that even in playing to this audience he commonly played to the gallery. As the orator of a popular assembly, as the orator of a monster meeting, he probably never had an equal in these countries. He had many of the physical endowments that are especially favorable to success in such a sphere. He had a herculean frame, a stately presence, a face capable of expressing easily and effectively the most rapid alternations of mood, and a voice which all hearers admit to have been almost unrivalled for strength and sweetness. Its power, its pathos, its passion, its music have been described in words of positive rapture by men who detested O'Connell, and who would rather, if they could, have denied to him any claim on public attention, even in the matter of voice. He spoke without studied preparation, and of course had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition and into carelessness of construction; he was hurried away into exaggeration and sometimes into mere bombast. But he had all the peculiar success, too, which rewards the orator who can speak without preparation. He always spoke right to the hearts of his hearers. On the platform or in Parliament, whatever he said was said to his audience, and was never in the nature of a discourse delivered over their heads. He entered the House of Commons when he was nearly fiftyfour years of age. Most persons supposed that the style of speaking he had formed, first in addressing juries, and next in rousing Irish mobs, must cause his failure when he came to appeal to the unsympathetic and fastidious House of Commons. But it is certain that O'Connell became one of the most successful Parliamentary orators of his time. Lord Jeffrey, a professional critic, declared that all other speakers in the House seemed to him only talking school-boy talk af

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