19 Soldier for Liberty The two men shook hands, then chose their pistols from a case. “Are you certain, Mr. O’Connell,” said the first man, with a trace of a sneer, “that you wish to die today? Have you not a wife and a brood of Irish children? Would it not be better to live in disgrace?” “If I die, Mr. D’Esterre,” said Daniel O’Connell, “I die for my countrymen’s rights. If you die, you die for a pack of rogues and scoundrels. Much good may it do you.” D’Esterre had won many a duel in the past. He was used to this sort of thing. His puppeteers in the Dublin Corporation, an organization of English bigots whom O’Connell had offended by calling them what they were, looked upon this as their day of liberation from a dangerous pest. O’Connell had been a reluctant soldier for England during her conflicts with revolutionary France. He said once that if you wanted to build a nation, human blood was a poor mortar for the job. Yet he knew that he could not back down now. It would bring his whole movement into disrepute, and that would be more likely to pitch Ireland into civil insurrection.
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