PREFACE


The Irish Confederation still awaits its historian. Three of its leaders
have left narratives of its brief and momentous career, but, of the
three, Doheny alone participated in the Insurrection that dug the
political grave of Young Ireland. In "The Felon's Track," written hot on
his escape from the stricken land, he tells the story vividly and
passionately. It has morals deducible for all manner of Irishmen, and
one for those English statesmen who comfort themselves with the illusion
that Irish Nationalism, like Jacobitism, is a platonic sentiment. The
man who, roused from his bed at midnight by tapping fingers on his
window and a voice whispering that insurrection was afoot, rose and rode
away in the darkness to join himself to its desperate fortunes was no
young man ardent for adventure. Michael Doheny, when he left his home
and his career to engage in the fatal enterprise, was a sober
middle-aged barrister, a man of weight and fortune into which he had
built himself by the hard toil of twenty years. His social anchorages
were deep-cast--and no mere sentiment provokes such a man to throw aside
the hard-won harvest of his life and risk the rebel's or the felon's
fate.

In the leadership of the Young Ireland party Michael Doheny was, save
Smith O'Brien, the oldest man and, like O'Brien, his counsels while
courageous were always restrained. There was little other likeness
between the men. Doheny sprang from the poorest class of the Irish
farmers. At Brookfield, near Fethard in Tipperary, where he was born in
May, 1805, he followed the plough on his father's little holding,
earning literally his bread in the sweat of his brow, and educating