From his vantage-ground as a member of Parliament O'Connell led a fresh agitation for the "Repeal," meaning the repeal of the Act of Union which had destroyed the Dublin Parliament. His oratory, which in its power over vast multitudes of his emotional countrymen has never been surpassed, made him the idol of his party. To boisterous congregations of tens of thousands he declaimed his bitter harangues on Saxon injustice to the Celt. But when the people had been brought to fever heat the agitation failed because the orator proved to be a voice and nothing more. He yielded meekly to the proclamation of the government forbidding further meetings, and his followers forsook him when they saw that he would not cross the Rubicon and take arms after words had failed. The society called "Young Ireland," formed about 1840, took up the agitation for Irish nationality, and carried it to greater lengths than O'Connell had dared. Its fiery young leaders, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel, preached sedition with voice and newspaper press, and in 1848, only by the vigorous exertion of physical force was open rebellion averted. The principal men of the Young Ireland party were seized and condemned to death for high treason, though they ultimately got off with transportation to Australia, whence most of them eventually found their way to America, whither thousands of their countrymen had emigrated since the famine year of 1846. The famine marks a turning-point in the history of the relations of England and Ireland. As has been narrated in another place, it was the dearth of food in Ireland which forced the government of Sir Robert Peel to do what the Cobdenites had been demanding for ten years, and repeal the Corn Laws. Probably the distressful plight of the Irish peasant had never been brought so strongly to the attention of Englishmen as by the reports which now reached England from the agents of the relief committees who visited every part of the island ascertaining conditions and distributing food. From this time a considerable number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for the Irish nationalist treasury.