Adverting, in 1872, to its fatal influence on Ireland, he remarked: “... The Civil War in America had just ceased, and a band of military adventurers, Poles, Italians, and many Irishmen, concocted at New York a conspiracy to invade Ireland, with the belief that the whole country would rise to welcome them. How that conspiracy was baffled ... I need not now remind you.... You remember how the constituencies were appealed to, to vote against the Government who had made so unfit an appointment as that of Lord Mayo to the Viceroyalty of India. It was by his great qualities when Secretary for Ireland, by his vigilance, his courage, his patience, and his perseverance, that this conspiracy was defeated. He knew what was going on at New York, just as well as what was going on in the city of Dublin?...” And when, only a year before, the then Lord Hartington, at a moment of Fenian resurrection, withdrew his motion for a secret committee, Disraeli inveighed against an indecision that would be flashed in an hour across the Atlantic. This new movement of Fenianism brought America into dangerous relations with England. And in many disguises and under mitigated forms, it half associated itself with the agitation for repeal, and the restless intrigues of the Papacy. Paid Nationalists and peasant priests were brought into connection with these Swiss guards of treason, ready to compass the destruction of property and authority in any country, and for any cause. It had been otherwise before its invention in America. When O’Connell--the great O’Connell as, despite everything, Disraeli publicly confessed when he died--supported Disraeli (who began as an “Independent”) at his first election in 1832, he did so on the common ground that both abominated the Whig system and desired the extension of reform. It was only afterwards, when O’Connell pronouncedly lent himself to what tended towards a repetition of “Captain Rock,” and became at once an agitator for dismemberment[137] and a pillar of the Whigs, that the young Disraeli denounced the fellowship of the dagger with the mitre, and incensed the degenerating patriot into insult. But the violence in Ireland of O’Connell’s days was native. It sprang from, and it disgraced, the soil. Fenianism, however, added to the ancient terrors of a country distressed to madness and goaded into crime, the worst horrors of cosmopolitan conspiracies mated with every movement for the unsettlement of Europe; and for a while it tainted every breath of Irish nationalism, not only with detestation of England, but with enthusiasm for her enemies. The “Clan-na-gael” still foments the last vestiges of genuine discontent; but the headquarters seem to have shifted from New York to a European capital. And yet so unconcerted and unprepared was Ireland herself, however equipped and compact were these mercenary foreigners, that Disraeli makes “Captain Bruges” exclaim in _Lothair_, after his rescue of the hero at the meeting, held under the