It was in America that the next alarm was sounded after two unquiet decades. A widely ramified secret society, the Fenian Brotherhood, sprang up among the Irish exiles and emigrants in the United States about 1857, its members swearing "to free and regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England." The movement spread to Ireland, and Fenian lodges were organized even on British soil. The close of the American Civil War set loose many Irish veterans who eagerly enlisted in the cause of "the Irish Republic." The reports of vast enlistments and contributions in America alarmed the British government. In February, 1866, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Ireland, and scores of suspects were thrown into jail. In May an armed band of Irish- American Fenians crossed the Niagara River to invade Canada. The attempt failed miserably, as did the plans for a general rising in Ireland. But a succession of surprises, jail deliveries, gunpowder plots, and the like, kept the English government in a flutter for several years, and gave the name of Fenian a place in the somber side of the century's history. The most notable result of the Fenian outbreak, beyond its obvious one of embittering the feeling between the governing nation and the subject race, was that it aroused one man--and he the greatest statesman of his time--to the need of providing some far- reaching and sufficient remedy for the disease which showed such virulence. "We know," says McCarthy, the historian of the epoch, "that even the worst excesses of the movement impressed the mind of Mr. Gladstone with a conviction that the hour was appropriate for doing something to remove the causes of the discontent that made Ireland restless.....While many public instructors lost themselves in vain shriekings over the wickedness of Fenianism, and the incurable perversity of the Irish people, one statesman was already convinced that the very shock of the Fenian agitation would arouse public attention to the recognition of substantial grievance, and to the admission that the business of statesmanship was to seek out the remedy and provide redress." The statesman who accomplished the disestablishment of the Irish Church, reformed the Land Laws, and devoted the closing decade of a great career to a fruitless endeavor to secure to Ireland the benefits of self- government, certainly ranks among the century's foremost Englishmen. In length of parliamentary service, in the frequency and duration of his terms as premier, in administrative ability, in moral force, and moving eloquence, it would be difficult to find in the long history of English statesmanship a name which shines with a purer ray than that of William Ewart Gladstone.