ingenuously speaking, we cannot
claim the merit of a felicitous foresight. That result _has_ come round
which we foreboded; but not in that sense which we intended to authorize,
nor exactly by those steps which we wished to see. We looked for the
extinction of this national scourge by its own inevitable decays: through
its own organization we had hoped that the Repeal Association should be
confounded: we trusted that an enthusiasm, founded in ignorance, and which,
in no one stage, could be said to have prospered, must finally droop
_spontaneously_, and that once _having_ drooped, through mere defect of
actions that bore any meaning, or tendencies that offered any promise, by
no felicities of intrigue could it ever be revived. Whether we erred in
the philosophy of our anticipations, cannot now be known; for, whether
wrong or right in theory, in practice our expectation has been abruptly
cut short. _A deus ex machina_ has descended amongst us abruptly, and
intercepted the natural evolution of the plot: the executive Government
has summarily effected the _peripetteia_ by means of a _coup d'etat_; and
the end, such as we augured, has been brought about by means essentially
different.

Yet, if thus far we were found in error, would _not that_ argue a
corresponding error in the Government? If we, relying on the
self-consistency of the executive, and _because_ we relied on that
self-consistency, predicted a particular solution for the _nodus_ of
Repeal, which solution has now become impossible; presuming a
perseverance in the original policy of ministers, now that its natural
fruits were rapidly ripening--whereas, after all, at the eleventh hour
we find them adopting that course which, with stronger temptation, they
had refused to adopt in the first hour--were this the true portrait of
the case, would it be ourselves that erred, or Government?--ourselves in
counting on steadiness, or Government in acting with caprice? Meantime,
_is_ this the portrait of the case?

_That_ we shall know when Parliament meets; and possibly not before. At
present the attempts to explain, to reconcile, and, as it were, to
construe the Government system of policy, is first almost neglecting the
Irish sedition, and then (after half-a-year's sedentary and distant
skirmishing, by means of Chancery letters) suddenly, on the 7th day of
October, leaping into the arena armed cap-a-pie, dividing themselves like
a bomb-shell amongst the conspirators, rendi