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1885.]
Irish Feeling.
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erned: there may have been a tactical divergence as to the mode of delivering attacks on the Ministry. This will disappear as the prospect of the party being called to office draws nearer. Our veterans will perceive that it is absolutely necessary to prepare a second line of warriors who may step into their places by-and-by; and they will admit to their more intimate councils the younger aspirants who have already won their spurs and proved themselves worthy of high trust. Once they are allowed to plan as well as to fight, our rising paladins will, we doubt not, evince no symptom of division. The party will be ready whenever the country may call on it.

Mr Gladstone's troubles rendered him a little fretful on the 18th May, and his humour discharged itself in wrath at interruptions and indications of feeling coming from the Opposition. Is it possible that Mr Gladstone can have forgotten the behaviour practised by the great Liberal party when they were in opposition some eight or ten years ago? Then it was that party violence and party spite were first allowed to disturb the decorum of the House of Commons; and anything of the kind which may seem objectionable to-day is directly descended from the licence of Mr Gladstone's own friends. As Sir John Falstaff said to Master Gower: "If these manners become us not, he was a fool that taught them to us."

The people can undoubtedly put a stop to the misconduct of affairs, which is ruining and distressing us at home, and laying us open to the most galling sarcasms from other nations. The deliverance rests with themselves. If they will not rouse themselves to the effort necessary for displacing the mischievous men who are causing all this shame and loss, they may rely on it that calamities, far greater than we have yet had to bear, will be . our portion in the time which is shortly to come.


IRISH FEELING – 1885.

'Twas different in Forty-Eight,

But Irish Virtue's out of date;

And Irish Feeling kept alive

Another way in Eighty-Five.

'Twas then a lofty aspiration

Might well beseem a moral Nation:

King, Lords, and Commons – hearth and throne, –

And every man secured his own:

'Tis now one class's selfish sense

Of sordid gain in pounds and pence

Abstracted from another's purse

By vulgar arts of fraud and force, –

By murders, houghings, perjuries,