Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed not a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his first efforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harsh avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's; the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and patriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry, the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union, became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been feared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers of derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken down. No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of colonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech on the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He entered into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. He did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had grown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated." He left Sir Robert Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood, building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as well as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would, he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what cast or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political, intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. He