tossing the bridle on his arm, hastened to meet and welcome us. At a glance we recognised in him a true leader for the generous, passionate, intrepid peasantry of the South." O'Mahony strongly advised them to begin the insurrection that night in Carrick, and he left to collect the peasantry. O'Brien and his comrades proceeded to the town where the people received them with frenzied enthusiasm, calling out to be led immediately to the fray. "A torrent of human beings rushing through lanes and narrow streets"--such is Meagher's description of the scene--"surging and boiling against the white basements ... wild, half-stifled, passionate, frantic prayers of hope ... curses on the red flag: scornful delirious defiances of death.... It was the Revolution if we had accepted it." But it was not accepted. The local leaders were unworthy of the people. They persuaded O'Brien to go elsewhere. It was a cardinal and egregious mistake which he regretted within twenty-four hours. Had he brushed the quavering local leaders aside and given the word to the imploring people of Carrick the insurrection of 1848 would have become respectable. O'Mahony's followers to the number of 12,000 were on the march to Carrick when the news reached them of O'Brien's departure. Disheartened they broke up and returned to their homes. Doheny's account of what happened after the fatal retreat from Carrick needs to be amplified in connection with the final error of O'Brien's leadership. At the Council of War on the 28th of July O'Brien rejected the proposal to seize for the use of his followers all things needful, paying for them with drafts on the future Irish Government, and he declined the other practical proposal to offer farms rent-free to all who fought for Ireland. Neither would he assent to the suggestion that he and the other leaders should go into hiding until the harvest was reaped. Willing to fight and ready to die, he would not consent to conduct a revolution on revolutionary lines. The departure of Doheny and others--save Devin Reilly, who urged the abandonment of the insurrection as hopeless--was in pursuance of their plan to await the gathering of the harvest. O'Brien's attitude at the Council of War destroyed the last hope of the insurrection. He expected to get men to fight under his standard while he essayed no adequate provision for their support in the field, and interdicted them from interference with private property to supply them with the necessaries of the campaign. No nobler and braver man has appeared in modern Irish history than William Smith O'Brien, but at the head of an insurrectionary movement he was incompetent. There was none of his lieutenants who, in his position, could not have made the insurrection to some extent formidable.