Mr. Gladstone on Daniel O'Connell.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 348, 6 March 1889, Page 4

Mr. Gladstone on Daniel O'Connell.

Tujs forthcoming numberof the •Nineteenth Century contains an article by J\lr Gladstone upon Daniel O'Connell. Mr Gladstone admits that in early liie he shaicd the prejudices against O'Connell which weic established not by conviction, but by tiadition and education ; bub ho was not blind to his greatness. Indeed, in Mr Gladstone's opinion, if we pass down the line of history (but upwards on the moral scale) from Cleon, to Gracchus, to Rienzi, and even to Savonarola, none of them displayed powers equal to O'Connell's ; but they all differed in the vital point that they led one part of the community against another, while he led a nation, though a nation minus its dissentients, against conquerors who were never expelled, but never domesticated. For a parallel, continues the writer, we cannot take Ko&suth or Mazscini, who are small beside him. We must ascend more nearly to the level of the great Cavour, and there btill remain& this wide diflerence between them, that the work of Cavour was work in the Cabinet and Parliament alono, while O'Connell not only devised and regulated all interior counsels, but had also the actual handling all along of his own raw material — that is to say, ot tho people, and so handled them by direct personal agency that ho brought them to a state of discipline unequalled in the history of tho world. Upon no sovereign, upon no imperial chancellor, were the anxieties of empire ever more fully charged than upon O'Connell, who was laden with the thought of Ireland and with the supreme direction of its concerns. He was all along the missionary of an idea. That idea was the restoration of the public life of his country, which he believed —and too truly believed — to have been not only enfeebled, but exhausted and paralysed, by the Act of Union. It lay in his heart's core, from the dawn ol his opening manhood, from the commencement of his full political career. It became the mainspring of his acts, the absolute mistress of his time, of his purse, and of whatever additions his credit could make to his pecuniary resources. He loved his country with all his heart, and with all his mind, and with all his soul, and with all his strength. In O'Connell we pee more than in most even of the good men history that love and justice are essentially boundless, and that to spend them on one subject soems to in*

crease and nob to lessen the fund available for spending upon others also. He was an Irishman, bub also a cosmopolite. He advocated the cause of negro emancipation, and having adopted the political creed of Liberalism, he was as thorough an English Liberal as if he had no Ireland to think of. He is clearly to be regarded as a man who desired to maintain peace, property, and law. As a statesman, he had a capacity to embrace broad principles and hold them fast, and the faculty to distinguish between the means and the end. His end was the restoration of public life in Ireland, and this he pursued from youth to old age with unfaltering fidelity and courage. His gravest fault was a too ready indulgence in violent language, even against men whose character should have afforded protection.