There will always be a controversy among Irishmen as to whether Edmund Burke or Daniel O'Connell was the greater man. They were so different in their characteristics that it is difficult to draw a comparison. O'Connell was not a native of Dublin. He was born at the humble village of Cahirciveen, in County Kerry, one of the most forlorn, impoverished, and hopeless sections of the west coast. He was the son of an exile who fled to escape arrest and entered the service of France, and from him O'Connell inherited an intense prejudice and hatred of everything English and Protestant. He was educated in Cork for the priesthood, but changed his mind and was called to the bar when he was twenty-three years old. He immediately made a reputation, and by the time he was thirty was regarded as the ablest advocate in Ireland, without an equal in oratory. Probably no man ever surpassed him before a jury. O'Connell is regarded by many as the ablest of all Irishmen, but, as I have said, this claim is disputed in favor of Edmund Burke. He was equally strong as a politician and undertook the cause of Catholic emancipation in his very youth. In those days all Catholics were disenfranchised; they could not hold office or even vote; the schools were closed to them, and a Catholic child could only be taught by a private tutor or governess. Daniel O'Connell organized the parish priests for the movement and was the first to bring the clergy into politics. Through them he organized the people, and regular contributions were collected in the churches to pay the expenses of the campaign. O'Connell was the first Catholic to enter parliament, and the Duke of Wellington confessed that this was permitted only to avert a civil war. In 1828 he was elected to the British House of Commons, but was not admitted because he refused to take the anti-Catholic oath. He came back to his constituents and was elected again, and they continued to elect him, just as the merchants and bankers in the city of London continued to elect Baron Rothschild, who was refused admission for the same reason,--because he would not take the oath. He was the first Jew, as Daniel O'Connell was the first Roman Catholic, to obtain a seat upon the floor.