asses now it cannot deflect the national agitation by
a hair's breadth, or cause its intermission for a day."

Nobody who knows the Irish people ever expected anything else.
Agitators who live by agitation will always agitate, and only a few
namby-pamby Radicals ever thought otherwise. Those who would fain have
sold their souls for the Newcastle Programme also stand to be taken
in. This Home Rule Bill will not do. Another must be brought forward
immediately. Where is this dreary business going to end? When will Mr.
Gladstone consider that England has eaten dirt enough?

Newry, July 4th

No. 44.--THE PROSPEROUS NORTH.

This famous historical city must be eminently offensive to Irish
Nationalists. It is so clean and sweet and neat and tidy that you can
at once see the hopelessness of expecting Home Rule patriotism from
the place. There are no dunghills for it to grow in, and my somewhat
extensive experiences have long ago taught me that Home Rule and
Nationalist patriotism will not flourish in Ireland without manure,
and plenty of it. Anyhow, it is mostly associated with heaps of refuse
and pungent odours arising from decomposing matter, and in the south
and west is scarcely ever found flourishing side by side with modern
sanitation. Home Rule not only, like pumpkins and vegetable marrows,
requires a feculent soil, but like them, and indeed like all watery
and vaporous vegetables, it needs the forcing-frame. Left to its own
devices the movement would die at once. There is nothing spontaneous
about it. It is a weedy sort of exotic, thriving only by filth and
forcing. It cannot live an hour in the climate of Armagh. The cold,
keen air of these regions nips it in the bud. The peculative patriots
who are now monopolising Westminster have from time to time made
descents on the district, to sow the good seed, as it were, by the
wayside. But next day came a frost, a killing frost. The Northerners
are too mathematical. They have taken Lord Bacon's advice. They "weigh
and consider." They want logic, and will not be content with mere
rhetoric. They require demonstrations, and have opinions of their own.
Before accepting a theory they turn it round and round, and test it
with the square, the level, and the line. They care nothing for
oratory unless there is sense at the back of it. They know that fine
words butter no parsnips, and they know the antecedents of the
patriotic orators. They do not believe that a paid Parliam