made by the
offender himself, it is all the same. Having given it utterance, it is a
law, and he hates it accordingly. On the other hand, nothing can exceed
the generous, chivalrous personal and family loyalty of the Irish
nature. But it is a person he wants, not a constitution or a flag.

Of course, how far all these characteristics may be altered by
residence in America we are unable to say. We write of the Irishman in
Ireland, from lifelong acquaintance. What dreams the Fenians in America
may indulge, we are also in no position to know. But this we may safely
aver: The Irishmen in Ireland who are caught by such schemes of
rebellion and revolution are not, as might be thought, mere vulgar
agitators, eager for notoriety or perhaps plunder. They are (such of
them as are the dupes, not the dupers) men whose minds from childhood
have been filled with anti-historic visions of Ireland's former
grandeur, and who cherish patriotic indignation for her supposed wrongs,
and patriotic hopes of her future glory. In a word, they live in a world
of unrealities almost inconceivable to a cool Saxon brain,--unreal
splendors of the past and utterly unreal and impossible future hopes.
They neither see where England has actually wronged Ireland heretofore,
nor how her Constitution opens to them now (were they but once united)
the lawful means of obtaining all just redress and beneficial
legislation they can desire. Instead of this, they are still talking of
Tara and Kincora, of Ollamh Fodhla and Brien Boiromhe, and dream in the
year of grace 1866 to set England at naught with a few thousand
undisciplined troops, and then burn down the hundred or two of handsome
houses and banish all the cultivated men and women in the country (even
including the priests!), to inaugurate a grand era of universal
prosperity and civilization.

But however delusive the indignation and the hopes of the Fenians must
be accounted, the sad fact remains that old misgovernment and oppression
have left behind a train of evil feelings, whose existence is only too
real, however fantastic may be the shapes they assume. While three or
four centuries sufficed to obliterate all trace of the Norman Conquest,
and unite in indissoluble bonds of blood and language the two races who
contended for mastery at Hastings, in Ireland, on the contrary, seven
centuries have failed, not merely to efface, but even essentially to
diminish the sharpness of the distinction between the con