21 Soldier for Liberty membership was a mere penny a month—a shilling a year. That brought into the political light the poorest of men, the Irish tenant farmers, in the years before the potato blight. Within a year or two, O’Connell was holding what he called “monster” meetings of the association: as many as 100,000 people would gather in one place to hear the speeches of men who wanted to set them free. It is important to note that the English wanted to retain their unjust hold over the Irish, but also that they worshiped the same God as the Irish, though not in the same church. In other words, they had consciences after all. O’Connell was counting on the power of moral persuasion, while carrying in his pocket the ace of trumps, which would have been a threat not to wage war, but to cease to prevent the Irish people from it. The English authorities were held in a pincers. They tried to use legalistic means to shut down the association, but O’Connell merely founded another. If they took up arms against the Irish, they would have had a disaster on their hands, certainly a costly distraction from their more lucrative imperial enterprises elsewhere. If they did anything to O’Connell personally, the Irish would not have forgiven them. We get a sense of what a formidable opponent O’Connell was from this finale of an oration in the House of Commons, late in his life, in
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzMzNzY=