en asked to
pay it, had at once acknowledged the necessity of doing so? Could
not Mr. Finn remember that he himself had stood in danger of his
life before a British jury, and that, though he had been, no doubt
properly, acquitted of the crime imputed to him, circumstances had
come out against him during the trial which, if not as criminal, were
at any rate almost as disgraceful? Could he not have had some mercy
on a broken political adventurer who, in his aspirations for public
life, had shown none of that greed by which Mr. Phineas Finn had
been characterised in all the relations of life? As for the Prime
Minister, "We," as Mr. Quintus Slide always described himself,--"We
do not wish to add to the agony which the fate of Mr. Lopez must
have brought upon him. He has hounded that poor man to his death
in revenge for the trifling sum of money which he was called on to
pay for him. It may be that the first blame lay not with the Prime
Minister himself, but with the Prime Minister's wife. With that we
have nothing to do. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. The bare
mention of the name of her Grace the Duchess in Parliament would have
saved the Duke, at any rate as effectually as he has been saved by
the services of his man-of-all-work, Phineas Finn, and would have
saved him without driving poor Ferdinand Lopez to insanity. But
rather than do this he allowed his servant to make statements about
mysterious agents, which we are justified in stigmatizing as untrue,
and to throw the whole blame where but least of the blame was due. We
all know the result. It was found in those gory shreds and tatters
of a poor human being with which the Tenway Railway Station was
bespattered."

Of course such an article had considerable effect. It was apparent at
once that there was ample room for an action for libel against the
newspaper, on the part of Phineas Finn if not on that of the Duke.
But it was equally apparent that Mr. Quintus Slide must have been
very well aware of this when he wrote the article. Such an action,
even if successful, may bring with it to the man punished more of
good than of evil. Any pecuniary penalty might be more than recouped
by the largeness of the advertisement which such an action would
produce. Mr. Slide no doubt calculated that he would carry with him a
great body of public feeling by the mere fact that he had attacked a
Prime Minister and a Duke. If he could only get all the publicans in
London to take his