of State, the Post Office, was engaged in the
distribution of the journal which he devoted exclusively to stirring up
animosity against that State, and traitorous opposition to its
constitution.

Further, Mr. Blaine's vitriolic outpourings, his unnatural defilement of
his own nest, were gravely quoted in every newspaper in the Kingdom,
without a hint of recognition of the fact that they were fundamentally
criminal and a public offence. The sacrosanct "liberty of the subject"
was involved; and though Mr. Blaine would have been forcibly restrained
if he had shown any tendency to injure lamp-posts, or to lay hands upon
his own worthless life, he was given every facility in his
self-appointed task of inciting the public to all sorts of offences
against the State, and to a variety of forms of national suicide.

It was the commonest thing for a Member of Parliament, a man solemnly
sworn and consecrated to the loyal service of the Crown and State, to
fill a signed column of Clement Blaine's paper, with an article or
letter the whole avowed end of which would be the championing of some
national enemy or rival, or the advocacy of means whereby a shrewd blow
might be struck against British rule or British prestige in some part of
the world.

I recall one long and scurrilous article by a Member of Parliament,
urging rebellious natives in South Africa to take heart of grace and
pursue with ever-increasing vigour their attacks upon the small and
isolated white populace which upheld British rule in that part of the
Continent. I remember a long and venomous letter from another Member of
Parliament (a strong advocate of the State payment of members) defending
in the most ardently sympathetic manner both the action and the
sentiments of a municipal official who had torn down and destroyed the
Union Jack upon an occasion of public ceremony.

We called this sort of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and
when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it,
they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well
they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant
their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent--that
was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An
attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the
basest creature ever outlawed from any community--that was certain of
ready and eager hospitality in the