The history of Ireland after the resignation of Lord Aberdeen was summed up in the administration of Coercion Acts that were rendered necessary by outrages which a peasantry infuriated by land clearances and rack-rents perpetrated. For a time the policy of eviction and emigration went on unresisted. In 1854 the rebels of ’48 were amnestied, but when they came back they found that Irishmen regarded them rather as reactionaries than rebels. As had always been the case in Ireland, the pendulum of public opinion had now swung over from Anti-Unionism to Separatism. The failure of ’48, the triumph of the evicting landlords, the progressive poverty of the people, the treachery of leaders like Sadlier and Keogh, who were bought up by the Whigs, disgusted Irishmen with Parliamentary agitation. The Fenian conspiracy was the outcome of this feeling. It originated among victims of the famine clearances, and among some of the men of ’48. It was introduced into Ireland during the Indian Mutiny by Mr. James Stephen, when it was known as the Phœnix Society. One of his first converts was a Jeremiah Donovan, of Skibbereen, who afterwards dubbed himself O’Donovan Rossa. He in turn, induced ninety out of the hundred members of the Skibbereen Club to join his band. That Society could hardly have conducted its proceedings with much secrecy at this time, for it was soon denounced from every altar in the country. The Lord-Lieutenant, however, proclaimed it, and there and then elevated the Phœnix plotters to the dignity of national heroes. The leaders were arrested, and on pleading guilty were released with admonition. But over the Atlantic the Society had taken firmer root among the victims of evicting landlords, as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. Yet even there it would have probably perished from the opposition of the priests and the advocates of open agitation, but for the cleverness with which its leaders made capital out of the famous McManus funeral. McManus, one of the most amiable and highly respected members of the Young Ireland Party, had, after his escape from Van Diemen’s Land, settled in California, where he died. It was resolved by his compatriots to exhume his body and convey it to Ireland for burial. The route of the funeral, from San Francisco to Dublin, was naturally at every stage the scene of a patriotic Irish demonstration, and by adroit management the Fenian leaders had contrived to get control of all the arrangements, so that the reflected _prestige_ of this impressive and imposing demonstration of Irish nationalism went to their credit. In Ireland the Society was soon considered to be the only one that had any real power to help the people, and after the McManus funeral it grew apace. In 1862 it announced at Chicago its intention of establishing Irish independence by armed force, and its organ--the _Irish People_--was founded in Dublin by Messrs. John O’Leary, Thomas Clark Luby, and Charles James Kickham.