ly at times. Take
my word for it, the secret of success with "the collective wisdom" is
reiteration. Tell them the same thing, not once or twice or even ten, but
fifty times, and don't vary very much even the way you tell it. Go on
repeating your platitudes, and by the time you find you are cursing your
own stupid persistence, you may swear you have made a convert to your
opinions. If you are bent on variety, and must indulge it, ring your
changes on the man who brought these views before them--yourself, but
beyond these never soar. O'Connell, who had a variety at will for his own
countrymen, never tried it in England: he knew better. The chawbacons that
we sneer at are not always in smock-frocks, take my word for it; they many
of them wear wide-brimmed hats and broadcloth, and sit above the gangway.
Ay, sir,' cried he, warming with the theme, 'once I can get my countrymen
fully awakened to the fact of who and what are the men who rule them, I'll
ask for no Catholic Associations, or Repeal Committees, or Nationalist
Clubs--the card-house of British supremacy will tumble of itself; there
will be no conflict, but simply submission.'

'We're a long day's journey from these convictions, I suspect,' said
Kearney doubtfully.

'Not so far, perhaps, as you think. Do you remark how little the English
press deal in abuse of us to what was once their custom? They have not, I
admit, come down to civility; but they don't deride us in the old fashion,
nor tell us, as I once saw, that we are intellectually and physically
stamped with inferiority. If it was true, Mr. Kearney, it was stupid to
tell it to us.'

'I think we could do better than dwell upon these things.'

'I deny that: deny it _in toto_. The moment you forget, in your dealings
with the Englishman, the cheap estimate he entertains, not alone of your
brains and your skill, but of your resolution, your persistence, your
strong will, ay, your very integrity, that moment, I say, places him in a
position to treat you as something below him. Bear in mind, however, how he
is striving to regard you, and it's your own fault if you're not his equal,
and something more perhaps. There was a man more than the master of them
all, and his name was Edmund Burke; and how did they treat _him_? How
insolently did they behave to O'Connell in the House till he put his heel
on them? Were they generous to Sheil? Were they just to Plunket? No, no.
The element that they decry in our people they