The Famine and its consequences seemed a final proof of the failure of the English Government to preserve the elementary interests of Ireland, and a section of the Young Irelanders could see no other remedy than an appeal to force, if they were to regain independence and keep Ireland from destruction. John Mitchel seceded from _The Nation_ and founded _The United Irishman_, in which week after week with extraordinary eloquence and courage he advocated the policy of resistance. He advised the peasantry to procure arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better could be had, to resist the official searches for arms (for a stringent Coercion Act had been one of the weapons with which the Government combatted the Famine) and to refuse to allow food to leave the country. He appealed in a series of letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to help Ireland as they had helped before in the days of the United Irishmen. Had all the leaders of the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of Mitchel, and had any of them known how to organize a rebellion, they would not have lacked a very formidable following. But Mitchel was arrested, sentenced and transported before anything was done and the actual outbreak under Smith O'Brien and Meagher was doomed to failure from the outset. Mitchel had advanced far beyond "moral force" and the Repeal of the Union. He had definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union out of existence: he regarded no policy as either practicable or manly which did not begin and end in the assertion that Ireland was a free country and was prepared to adopt any and every means to put her freedom into practice. Like all the Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life as a Repealer and a follower of O'Connell; he had appealed to the Irish gentry to act again as they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since the Union and especially the experiences of the Famine years (there had been several partial famines before 1846) was making some serious thinkers very sceptical of a political solution which left one of the main factors of politics out of account. The man who saw the defects of the Repeal solution and exposed them most trenchantly and convincingly was James Fintan Lalor. In a series of letters and articles written for _The Nation_ and for the _Irish Felon_ he expounded a theory of nationality which went to the very roots of political facts. His policy was not Repeal; "I will never," he said, "contribute one shilling or give my name, heart, or hand, for such an object as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union." The facts of everyday life in Ireland showed that a new social system was required, the old having had its day. "There was no outrise or revolt against it. It was not broken up by violence. It was borne for ages with beggarly patience, until it perished by the irritation of God in the order of nature." So long as a system remained in which the