eland, not intelligence. The
bill will, of course, give nothing that the peasants expect. The fault
will assuredly lie with John Bull. The expectations of the ignorant,
that is, the great mass of the people, will be woefully disappointed.
Who is to blame? they will ask. Numbers of politicians are waiting to
tell them. Who but the brutal, greedy, selfish, perfidious Saxon? An
agitation will succeed, compared with which the worst times of the
Land League were preferable. I shudder to think of the chaos, the
seething and weltering confusion of the time to come. The Irish
people, the poor ignorants, will suffer most. And yet they are
innocent in this matter. They have, indeed, been blamed with the
excesses of a few of their number, but they are, if left to
themselves, a most kindly and law-abiding people. The Donegal peasants
are the best in the country. You will see poverty, but the degradation
of filthiness and laziness is not nearly so marked as in the South and
West, where the climate is warm, moist, enervating.

"What, then, are my opinions, expressed in a concise form? I will tell
you. They are what _you_ would call sound. They are the opinions of
Balfour, of Lord Salisbury. I hold Mr. Balfour in profound esteem as a
wise and sagacious administrator, a terror to evil-doers, and an
encourager of those who do well. I have a real affection for Mr.
Balfour, as for a great benefactor of my beloved country. For I love
my country so well that I feel the keenest personal interest in her
welfare. Perhaps I have a deeper affection for Ireland than even Tim
Healy or Sexton or Harcourt or O'Brien. What do I think of Gladstone?
I think him a scourge of Ireland, a curse, a destroyer far worse than
Oliver Cromwell. A heaven-born statesman? Do his followers call him
that? Well, I can only say that I hope and trust that heaven will not
be blessed with any further family."

A military officer resident in this region, an Irishman bred and
born, said, "It's all a matter of religion. I was the other day
reading Maxwell's account of the Irish rebellion of 1798, and I
observed that although the Northern rebellion, which was the most
dangerous, as being the best organised, was mainly led by Protestants,
yet in other parts of Ireland, when a suspected person was captured by
the rebels, the first question was, not are you in favour of the Irish
Republic, but what is your religion? And the Protestants generally had
their throats cut. The same