and vindicate his career. By me even his mistakes shall be treated with
forbearance.

A brief reference to the struggle for Catholic Emancipation becomes here
imperative. That struggle has had no equal in history--nor for its moral
grandeur, nor for its triumph--but for the singular difficulties which
the position of the Irish Catholic imposed on those who engaged in it.
It is an error to call it emancipation. It was neither the first nor the
last, nor even the most important in the train of concessions, which are
entitled to the name of emancipation. The pains and penalties of the
"_penal laws_" had been long abolished, and that barbarous code had been
compressed into cold and stolid exclusiveness. But the vices which a
long and unrelenting slavery had burned into the character of the
country, remained. The lie of law, which assumed the non-existence of
the Catholic had infused itself into his nature, and while it was erased
from the statute book, it was legible on his heart. That terrible
necessity of denying his feelings, his property, his religion and his
very being, had stamped its degrading influence on his nature. In a
moral sense the law had become a truth--there was no people. The
Catholic gentry, giddy by their recent elevation, had only changed for
that semblance of liberty their old stern spirit of resistance and
revenge. Their new concessions hung gracefully around them, but they
were like grafts on an ash stock--their growth was downward, and they
wanted the stature and dignity of the native tree. Such were the means
at Mr. O'Connell's disposal. His enemies on the other hand were false,
powerful, dexterous and unscrupulous. His efforts necessarily partook of
the character both of the weapons he was obliged to wield and the foes
he struck down. As he advanced to eminence and strength, means, the most
crafty and cruel, were taken to overthrow him, every one of which he
foiled by a sagacity infinitely above that of his oppressors. So