lency is affable with the mayor; her
Excellency is confidential and gracious with the mayoress--we might have
been schoolchildren in the same townland we are so cordial. Everything
proceeds amid plaudits, and winds up in acclamation. Their Excellencies
depart. Great is the no-politics era--you can so quietly spike the guns
of many an old politician--and keep him safe. The social amenities do
this. Their Excellencies have gone, but they do not forget. There is a
warm word of thanks for recent hospitality. Perhaps the mayor has a
daughter about to be married, or a son has died; it is remembered, and
the cordial congratulation or gracious sympathy comes duly under the
great seal. What surly man would resent sympathy? And so, the strength
of the old warrior is sapped; the web is woven finely; in its secret net
the Castle has its man. You who have exercised yourselves in Dublin
recently over mayoral doings, note all this--not to the making light of
any man's surrender, but to the true judging of the event, its deeper
significance and danger. Whoever fails must be called to account. When a
man takes a position of trust, influence, and honour, and, whatever the
difficulty, abandons a principle he should hold sacred, he must be held
responsible. A battle is an ordeal, and we must be stern with friend and
foe. But there is something more sinister than the weakness of the man:
remember the net.

VI

The concrete case makes clear the principle in question. The man whom we
have seen go down would have been safe if he had to fight no battle but
one he could face with all his true friends, and in the open light of
day. Having to fight a secret battle was never even considered: threats
direct or vague or subtle, blandishments, cajolery, graciousness,
patronage, flattery, plausible generalities, attacks indirect and
insidious--all coming without pause, secret, silent, tireless. He who is
to be proof against this, and above threat or flattery, must have been
disciplined with the discipline of a life that trains him for every
emergency. You cannot take up such a character like a garment to suit
the occasion: it must be developed in private and public by all those
daily acts that declare a man's attitude, register his convictions, and
form his mind. It gives its own reward at once, even in the day where
nothing is apparently at stake; where men scramble furiously over the
petty things of life; for he who sees these things at their pr