This impression inevitably would be that Mr. Duffy modelled and moulded the proceedings of the Confederation at his mere pleasure; that Mr. Duffy was not alone averse to revolution, but actually conservatively loyal; and that, in the spirit of that loyalty, he controlled the whole body, and kept an insensate "Jacquerie," which existed within it, in check--that it was only when he was sent to prison this Jacquerie obtained the ascendant, and that Mr. Duffy was the victim of their intemperate folly. However agreeable all this may be to personal vanity, Mr. Duffy must feel compelled to reject it as audacious and unmeaning flattery. There is much more at stake than the estimate of private character--the highest interests of truth. They require that it should be made known and incontestably established that every word of the above--fact and inference--is unfounded. As to the statement that Mr. Duffy was made the victim of others' intemperance, its converse could be much more easily sustained. But it satisfies every requirement of truth simply to state that, morally speaking, Mr. Duffy was equally responsible for the late outbreak, with those who perilled their lives and lost their liberty forever in the struggle.
The _United Irishman_ started under auspices more flattering than ever cheered the birth of a similar enterprise. The man in Dublin, who did not read the first number, might indeed be pronounced a bigot or a fool. Every word struck with the force and terror of lightning. So great was the sale of the first number that the press was kept busy for three days and nights. When the second was announced, a guard of police was necessary to keep order and peace among the newsvendors around the office door. In every corner of the island the influence of the _United Irishman_ was instant and simultaneous. The letters to the Ulster farmers caused a sensation as universal and profound as the letters to Lord Clarendon excited sentiments of wonder and alarm. Thomas Devin Reilly's powers, too, never before tested in this range of literature, astonished even the warmest admirers of his genius. The journal at once attained a standard of eminence, political, literary and poetical, never accorded to a production of the kind, published in Ireland. For the days in which they were written, the songs and essays of Thomas Davis contained greater depth, and a holier purpose. They seemed to flow, too, from a diviner inspiration; were of a wider, calmer and more generous scope. But the times were different; and it was as if the spirit of fire, burning at the bases of man's social hopes throughout Europe, breathed its prophetic glow on the heart of John Mitchel, conscious that he, of all men, in a prostrate land, could find it befitting utterance. It must not be omitted that the muse of "Mary," of "Eva," and of poor Clarence Mangan, considerably enhanced the high estimate of the _United Irishman_.