Out of this wreck and ruin there arose the party of "Young Ireland," led, with more or less wisdom, by Mitchell, Smith O'Brien (descended from Brian Boru), Dillon, and Meagher. Mitchell was soon transported, and later O'Brien and Meagher were under sentence of death, which was afterward commuted, Meagher surviving to lay down his life for the North in the civil war in America. It is not strange that these men were driven to futile insurrections, maddened as they were by the sight of their countrymen, not yet emerged from the horrors of famine, forced in droves out of the shelter of their {243} miserable cabins, for non-payment of rent. It has been told in foregoing pages how it came about that absentee English landlords owned a great part of Ireland. From this had arisen the custom of subletting; and when it is known that sometimes four people stood between the tenant and the landlord, it will be realized how difficult it was to place responsibility, to do justice, or to show mercy in such an iniquitous system. It was the system, not the landlord, that was vicious. Eviction has done as much as famine to depopulate Ireland. It has driven millions of Irishmen into America; and the cruelty and even ferocity with which it has been carried out cannot be overstated. Whatever the weather, for the sick, or even for the dying, there was no pity. Out they must go; and to make sure that they would not return, the cabin was unroofed! And then, if the wretched being died under the stars by the road-side, he might, in the words of Mitchell, "lift his dying eyes and thank God that he perished under the best constitution in the world!" At the close of the American civil war it was believed by Irishmen that the strained {244} relations between England and America would lead to open conflict. An organization named Fenians (after the ancient Feni) formed a plan for a rising in Ireland, which was to be simultaneous with a raid into Canada by way of America. The United States Government took vigorous action in the matter of the Canadian raid, and the failure of this and of other violent attempts at home put an end to the least creditable of all such organizations.