rebel and the
hunger, and solitude, and death of the fortress of St. Peter and St.
Paul, or the march to Siberia.

[Sidenote: The lawyer and the hangman.]

In all such squalid tragedies, men of the Carson type are a necessary
portion of the machinery, as necessary as the informer that betrays--as
the warder who locks the door--as the hangman who coils the rope. Mark
you, all the forms--all the precautions--all the outward seeming of
English law and liberty--are in these Irish courts. The outside is just
the same as in any court that meets in the Old Bailey; but it is all the
mask and the drapery, behind which the real figures are the foregone
verdict, the partisan judge--the prepared cell or constructed gallows.
In the regime of coercion which has just expired, the whole machinery
was in motion. The last sentence of the law was not resorted to in
political offence, for the days of rebellion in the open field had
passed. But there were the Resident Magistrates ready to do their master
Balfour's bidding, and to send men to imprisonment, in some cases
followed by bread-and-water discipline--by stripping of clothes and
other atrocities, which made the court of the Resident Magistrate the
antechamber to the cell, and the cell the antechamber to the tomb. In
all these ghastly and tragic dramas, enacted all over Ireland, Mr.
Carson was the chief figure--self-confident, braggart,
deliberate--winding the rope around his victim's neck with all the
assured certainty of the British Empire, Mr. Balfour and the Resident
Magistrates behind him.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson's exterior.]

Nature has stamped on Mr. Carson's exterior the full proclamation of his
character and career. There is something about his appearance and manner
that somehow or other seems to belong rather to the last than the
present century. He is a very up-to-date gentleman in every sense of the
word--clothes included. But the long, lantern, black-coloured jaws, the
protruding mouth, the cavernous eyes, the high forehead with the hair
combed straight back--all seem to suggest that he ought to be wearing
the wig, the queue, and the sword of the eighteenth century. He looks as
though he had come from consultation, not with Mr. Balfour, but Lord
Castlereagh, and as if the work he were engaged in was the sending of
the Brothers Sheares to Tyburn, not William O'Brien to Tullamore, and as
though he had stopped up o' nights to go over again the list of the
Irishmen that