for
much. Mr. McGregor, of Anglesea Street, Dublin, once an earnest
Gladstonian, said:--"The corner-men are Home Rulers because they want
to spend what they never earned, and the farmers because they hope to
get the land for nothing." The Dublin hotel-keepers are mostly Home
Rulers, and the proprietor of Jury's, next door to the proposed House
in College Green, is supposed to be consumed with patriotic fire. The
hotel has recently been refitted. The Dublin shopkeepers, "those of
the largest size," are strangely lacking in patriotism, and mostly
support the Union. Patriotism is claimed for the Nationalist members,
who, according to Nationalist sheets, were lifted from bog-holes,
tripe shops, and small whiskey shops to decide the destinies of
empires, to revel in comparative luxury, to enjoy a certain social
distinction, to exchange their native bogs for the British metropolis,
and to draw a salary beyond their wildest dreams. These questionable
gentlemen, with the horse's tongue and cow's tail cutters, the
firebrand priests and landlord-shooters, the moonlight marauders who
shoot old women and children in the legs, burn the haystacks of their
neighbours, refuse coffins and decent burial for the dead, apply the
fiendish tortures of boycotting to innocent women and children,
refusing them the means of subsistence, and poisoning their water
supply with human filth--these _are_ patriots. Only their patriotism
must cost them nothing, It must be cultivated at the expense of
others. The patriots subscribe only under compulsion, and yet hope to
make a profit by the transaction. As of a certain party of old, it may
be said of them, "License they mean when they cry Liberty." Plunder
they mean when they cry Patriotism. The sober and industrious portion
of the Irish people, the pick of every part of Ireland, being opposed
to Nationalism, are denied the virtue of patriotism. The merchants and
manufacturers of Dublin and Belfast, the leading professional men of
Ireland, the most learned scholars of her great University, her great
soldiers, White, Wolseley, Roberts, her greatest living authors, the
whole of her Protestant clergy of whatever sect, with their
congregations, the pith and marrow of everything that is strong,
stable, cultured, enlightened, prescient, must be pronounced
unpatriotic--if Nationalism is Patriotism. Contrary to all human
experience and to the course and constitution of nature, the people of
England are asked to