r will you," said Billy, sententiously.

"And why so?"

"Because," said he, drawing a long breath, as if preparing for a
discourse,--"because there's no man capable of going into the whole
subject; for it's not merely an economical question or a social one, but
it is metaphysical, and religious, and political, and ethnological, and
historical,--ay, and geographical too! You have to consider, first, who
and what are the aborigines. A conquered people that never gave in they
were conquered. Who are the rulers? A Saxon race that always felt that
they were infarior to them they ruled over!"

"By Jove, Doctor, I must stop you there; I never heard any
acknowledgment of this inferiority you speak of."

"I'd like to get a goold medal for arguin' it out with you," said Billy.

"And, after all, I don't see how it would resolve the original doubt,"
said Harcourt. "I want to know why the people are so poor, and I don't
want to hear of the battle of Clontarf, or the Danes at Dundalk."

"There it is, you'd like to narrow down a great question of race,
language, traditions, and laws to a little miserable dispute about labor
and wages. O Manchester, Manchester! how ye're in the heart of every
Englishman, rich or poor, gentle or simple! You say you never heard
of any confession of inferiority. Of course you did n't; but quite
the reverse,--a very confident sense of being far better than the poor
Irish; and I'll tell you how, and why, just as you, yourself, after a
discusshion with me, when you find yourself dead bate, and not a word
to reply, you 'll go home to a good dinner and a bottle of wine, dry
clothes and a bright fire; and no matter how hard my argument pushed
you, you'll remember that _I'm_ in rags, in a dirty cabin, with potatoes
to ate and water to drink, and you 'll say, at all events, 'I 'm
better off than he is;' and there's your superiority, neither more or
less,--there it is! And all the while, _I'm_ saying the same thing to
_myself_,--'Sorrow matter for his fine broadcloth, and his white linen,
and his very best roast beef that he's atin',--I 'm his master! In all
that dignifies the spacies in them grand qualities that makes us poets,
rhetoricians, and the like, in those elegant attributes that, as the
poet says,--

"In all our pursuits
Lifts us high above brutes,'"

--in these, I say again, I 'm his master!'"

As Billy finished his growing panegyric upon his country and himself, he
burst out in a j