sense is necessarily
critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of
an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict, nor
is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an
estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day. Irishmen
are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy. Some of them
get along pretty well in America. The air of their Ireland intoxicates
them. They require the strong hand: fair legislation, but no show of
weakness. Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see
perfect independence in their grasp. And what would be the spectacle if
they were to cut themselves loose from England? The big ship might be
inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift on
the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew
playing Donnybrook freely. Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see
the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we
have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us. There is the capital
blunder, fons et origo.

Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand
everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.
Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present
Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess. Treat
them as policemen treat highwaymen: give them the law: and the law must
be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at it.
Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in due
course.

'Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,' said Mattock,
whose party opposed Rockney's. 'As to repression, you would have missed
that instructive scene this evening at Con O'Donnell's table, if you had
done him the kindness to pick up his glove. It 's wisest to let them
exhaust their energies upon one another. Hold off, and they're soon at
work.'

'What kind of director of a City Company does he make?' said Rockney.

Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O'Donnell
comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the
reasonable side, not without shrewdness: he seemed to be sobered by the
money question.

'That wife of his is the salvation of him,' Rockney said, to account for
the Captain's shrewdness. 'She manages him cleverly. He knows the length
of his line. She's a woman of princ