f a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Davitt at
Rathkeale, chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the
ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the
Nationalist orators and newspapers. I am not surprised to see this. Mr.
Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader, and no
such man can stomach the frothy and foolish vituperation to which
parliamentary agitators are addicted, not in Ireland only. Unlike Mr.
Parnell, who is forced to have one voice for New York and Cincinnati,
and another voice for Westminster, Mr. Davitt is free to be always
avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in
Ireland. I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the
Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of
Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the
English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an
executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make
him popular. Calling Mr. Forster "Buckshot" Forster did him no harm. On
the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr.
Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his
grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland. We hear a great
deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that
obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human
heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted
by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big
stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had
the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI. to
the scaffold.

Nobody who had not learned from the speeches made in England, and the
cable despatches sent to America, that freedom of speech and of the
press has been brutally trampled under foot in Ireland by a "Coercion"
Government would ever suspect it from reading the Dublin papers which I
this morning bought.

As a Democratic journalist I had some practical knowledge of a true
"Coercion" government in America a quarter of a century ago. The
American editor who had ventured in 1862 to publish in a New York or
Philadelphia newspaper a letter from Washington, speaking of the
Unionist Government by President Lincoln, as the letter from London
published to-day in the _Freeman's Journal_ speaks of the Unionist
Government of Lord Sali