ed on an instinctive feeling
that the claims and arguments of their own party are alike
preposterous--underneath this vein of unbelief is a vein of
extraordinary credulity. Poverty is to be at once and for ever
abolished. "The millions an' millions that John Bull dhrags out iv us,
to kape up his grandeur, an' to pay soldiers to grind us down, we'll
put into our own pockets, av you plaze," was the answer vouchsafed to
an inquiry as to what advantages were expected from the passing of the
Home Rule Bill. The speaker was a political barber. Another of the
craft said, in answer to the same query, "Well, Sorr, I think we have
a right to our indipindence. Sure, we'd be as sthrong as Switzerland
or Belgium." A small farmer from the outlying district thought that
rents would be lowered, that money would be advanced to struggling
tenants, that great public works would be instituted, and plainly
intimated that all these good things and many more had been roundly
promised by the Home Rule leaders, and that he, for one, fully
believed that all would duly come to pass, once the Bill were carried,
which happy event he never expected to see. Every man was to be a kind
of king in his own country, evictions were to be utterly unknown; the
peasantry were to live rent free, under a visionary scheme of which he
had all the absurd particulars; the old sporting maxim reminding
farmers that landlord shooting begins on January 1st and ends on
December 31st was to become obsolete by reason of a complete
extinction of the species--only an odd one being occasionally dug out
of the bogs along with trunks of bog-oak and skeletons of the great
Irish elk; while the family pig, which, having for ages occupied a
responsible position in the matter of "Rint," is understood to be an
inveterate landlord-hater, will be released from his delicate
situation, will be relieved from his harassing anxieties, will no
longer be sacrificed to the exigencies of the occasion; but, on the
contrary, will peacefully expire of old age, surrounded by every
tribute of respect. The dirtiest of the Dubliners hold opinions as to
the marvellous results of Home Rule more adapted to their own
positions and pursuits, but apparently on the same plane, no whit
higher in the scale of intelligence. They regard the English as their
natural enemies, and the lower you go the more truculent they become.
One and all they hold the belief, industriously instilled by
agitators, that the pover