The most colossal figure in the story of Ireland had now appeared. Daniel O'Connell, unlike the other great leaders, was a Catholic. In the language of another, "he was the incarnation of the Irish nation." All that they were, he was, on a majestic scale. His whole tremendous weight was thrown into the subject of Catholic emancipation; and, although a giant in eloquence and in power, it took him just twenty-nine years to accomplish it. In the year 1829, even Wellington, that incarnation of British conservatism, bent his head before the storm, and there was a full and unqualified removal of Catholic disabilities. O'Connell was not content; he did not pause. The tithe-system, that most odious of oppressions, must go. A starving nation compelled to support in its own land a Church it considered blasphemous! A standing army kept in their land to wring this tribute from them at the point of the bayonet! Think of a people on the brink of the greatest famine Europe has ever known, being in arrears a million and a quarter of pounds for tithes {241} for an Established Church they did not want! Is it strange that Sydney Smith said no abuse as great could be found in Timbuctoo? Is it a wonder that there was always disorder and violence from a chronic tithe-war in Ireland, which it is said has cost a million of lives? But in 1839, in the second year of Queen Victoria's reign, Parliament gave relief, in the following ingenious way. The burden was placed upon the _land_; the landlord must pay the tithe, not the people! The exasperation which followed took a form with which we are all more or less familiar. With the increase in rents which, of course, ensued, there commenced an anti-rent agitation which has never ceased. A repeal of the Union was the only remedy, and to this O'Connell devoted all his energies. In 1845, in one black night, a blight fell upon the potato-crop. Carlyle says "a famine presupposes much." What must be the economic condition of a people when there is only one such frail barrier between them and starvation! The famine was the hideous child of centuries. There is no need to dwell upon its details. Its name expresses all the horror of those two years, when Europe and {242} America strove in vain to relieve the famishing nation, even those who had food, dying, it is said, from the mental anguish produced by witnessing so much suffering which they could not assuage. The great O'Connell himself died of a broken heart in beholding this national tragedy. When it was over, Ireland had lost two millions of its population. Thousands had perished and thousands more had emigrated from the doomed land to America, there to keep alive, in the hearts of their children, the memory of their wrongs.