The young man’s face showed something of horror. Was the earth so small then that men must destroy each other to have their little bit? “Not at all. But there have always been those who would share nothing. Conquest has come to be a glorious thing. Our heroes are the men who take, not those who give!” The old man was in fine form that fall. The young man with his vibrant personality and searching questions inspired him. Earlier in the year he had vetoed plans for a huge rally at the great Conciliation Hall. The place held twenty thousand people and O’Connell had not felt equal to it. But now he announced a change of mind: he and Douglass would speak there together. It was an event talked of many a long winter evening afterward. “Dan--Our Dan,” they said, outdid himself. The massive stooped shoulders were squared, the white head high. Once more the magnificent voice pealed forth. “Until I heard this man that day,” Douglass himself wrote, “I had thought that the story of his oratory and power was exaggerated. I did not see how a man could speak to twenty or thirty thousand people at one time and be heard by any considerable portion of them, but the mystery was solved when I saw his ample person and heard his musical voice. His eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road. At will he stirred the multitude to a tempest of wrath or reduced it to the silence with which a mother leaves the cradle-side of her sleeping babe. Such tenderness, such pathos, such world-embracing love! And, on the other hand, such indignation, such fiery and thunderous denunciation, such wit and humor, I never heard surpassed, if equaled, at home or abroad.”[5] A piece on O’Connell came out in _Brownson’s Review_. Mr. O. A. Brownson, recently become a Catholic, took issue with the “Liberator” of Ireland for having attacked American institutions. O’Connell gave another speech. “I am charged with attacking American institutions, as slavery is called,” he began. “I am not ashamed.... My sympathy is not confined to the narrow limits of my own green Ireland; my spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, and wherever there is sorrow and suffering, there is my spirit to succor and relieve.” The striking pair toured Ireland together. O’Connell talked about the antislavery movement and why the people of Ireland should take part in it; Douglass preached O’Connell’s doctrines of full participation of all peoples in government and legislative independence. * * * * * “There must be government,” said O’Connell. They were talking together quietly in the old man’s rooms. “And the people must take part, must learn to vote and take responsibility. You have a fine Constitution in the United States of America. I have studied it carefully.” “I have never read it,” confessed the dark man, very much ashamed.