He
was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him
in speeches and in the press, and talked about it in a casual dreamy way
which reminded me irresistibly of President Lincoln, whom, if in nothing
else, he resembles alike in longanimity and in length of limb. He had
seen Davitt's _caveat_, filed at Rathkeale, against the foolishness of
trying to frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad
names. "Davitt is quite right," he said, "the thing must be getting to
be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take
them to be. One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had
to invent a special sign for the phrase 'bloody and brutal Balfour,' it
is used so often in the speeches." About the prosecution of Father
M'Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it
had been ordered. This he showed me. If the first duty of a government
is to govern, which is the American if not the English way of looking at
it, Father M'Fadden must have meant to get himself into trouble when he
used such language as this to his people: "I am the law in Gweedore; I
despise the recent Coercion Act; if I got a summons to-morrow, I would
not obey it." From language like this to the attitude of Father M'Glynn
in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is
but an easy and an inevitable step.

Neither "Home Rule" nor any other "Rule" can exist in a country in which
men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an
attitude. It is just the attitude of the "Comeouters" in New England
during my college days at Harvard, when Parker Pillsbury and Stephen
Foster used to saw wood and blow horns on the steps of the
meeting-houses during service, in order to free their consciences "and
protest against the Sabbatarian laws."

To see a Catholic priest assume this attitude is almost as amazing as to
see an educated Englishman like Mr. Wilfrid Blunt trying to persuade
Irishmen that Mr. Balfour made him the confidant of a grisly scheme for
doing sundry Irish leaders to death by maltreating them in prison.

I see with pleasure that the masculine instincts of Mr. Davitt led him
to allude to this nonsense yesterday at Rathkeale in a half
contemptuous way. Mr. Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and
good feeling. "When I first heard of it," he said, "I resented it, of
course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr. Blunt's character, and
denoun