The Catholic World, Vol. 27, April 1878 to September 1878

by Various

PROHIBITORY LEGISLATION: ITS CAUSE AND EFFECTS.

It has been well said that “the best government is that which governs least”; and it might with infinite propriety be added that the legislative body stultifies itself when it passes laws that cannot possibly be carried into effect. One such law on our statute-books, yet constantly and notoriously violated, does more to destroy that political morality with which our people are, to say the least, not overburdened—of which certainly there is no surplus—than would ten wrong practices against which no law exists. We learned, during the late war, of how little avail legislation is when it undertakes to regulate and declare the value of gold; and it is designed briefly to set forth in this article that the proposed much-vaunted prohibitory legislation touching alcoholic liquors is false in theory, must be unsuccessful in practice; that remedial (not repressive) measures are what is required; and to suggest means by which the end aimed at by such enactments can be attained without invading the domain of the church, the free-will of humanity, or placing the state in the odious light of executor of a grinding tyranny exercised by a temporary majority over a recalcitrant minority.

And here, in the outset, let it be understood that there is no difference between ourselves and the most ardent favorers of the Maine Law, or any similar enactment on this matter, concerning the detestable nature of drunkenness, which we both admit to be a damning sin in the sight of God and a crying scandal before man. That it is a loathsome vice is a proposition requiring only to be stated, not argued. Even the wretched being who is enthralled by it will admit this and lament his deplorable condition. The days are past when Fox, Pitt, and Sheridan went openly drunk to the House of Commons; when the usages of the highest society were such that we still retain therefrom the saying, “Drunk as a lord”; when the literature of the age informs us everywhere that gentlemen were not expected to be sober after dinner; when Burns could write in Presbyterian Scotland, “I hae been fou wi’ godly priests”; and when, in our own country, the first thing on entering and the last on leaving a house was a visit to the sideboard. Drunkenness is now deservedly considered by the entire community not only a vice but an inherently vulgar one. Fashionable society will not tolerate it, and there is no pretence of usage any longer set up that will even partially condone it. In short, it is the one unpardonable sin against modern society, and we are well pleased to see it ranked in this category. But while detesting drunkenness, and deprecating, in the strongest manner, the habitual use of intoxicating liquors, we dislike very much to perceive a tendency on the part of the public to ignore the fact that there are other sins besides the abuse of liquor, and that it is not by legal provision that people are to be kept sober. As Almighty God has been pleased to leave us our free-will, the reason is not evident why frail man should seek to take it away; and we object utterly to that queer manipulation by which the word “temperance” itself, the proper meaning of which is “moderation in any use or practice,” should be restricted to the moderate use of alcoholic drinks, much more that it should falsely be twisted and perverted into implying a total abstinence from them. Why should we be wise above what is written? Has Almighty God failed his church? Are we prepared to admit that Christianity is a miscarriage? This we tacitly do when we invoke to her aid the arm of the civil law. It is not to be doubted but there are persons so unfortunately constituted that they cannot use stimulants of any kind without abusing them. “Madam,” said Dr. Johnson to a lady who asked him to take a little wine—“madam, I cannot take a little, and therefore I take none at all!” Such persons must plainly abstain entirely; whether they shall do so of their own accord, by taking a simple pledge or by joining a “temperance society,” is for themselves to answer. In any case there is no safety for them save in total abstinence; but said abstinence, to have any merit whatever, must be voluntary, not one of legal enforcement.

While attention had, from time to time within the last century, been called to the intemperate use of alcoholic liquors, it is only within comparatively recent times that any organized efforts have been made to grapple with this monstrous evil. The first association for the purpose was made in Massachusetts in 1813. By its means facts and statistics were gathered and published for the purpose of calling the attention of the public to the magnitude of the evil, and suggestions made for its abatement or suppression. Similar associations were soon formed in adjoining States, and these again organized branches, until associations of the kind existed in nearly all the Eastern and Middle States. About 1820 there was formed in Boston “The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance,” which in 1829 had over one thousand auxiliary societies, no State in the Union being without one or more. The influences relied upon by this institution were the dissemination of tracts in which were portrayed the evil effects of the use of alcohol, and the employment of travelling lecturers to deliver addresses in favor of temperance. The first society professing the principle of total abstinence from intoxicating liquors was formed at Andover in 1826. These several societies, under one form or other, soon spread largely not only in our own country but in Canada, England, and Scotland, until they existed by hundreds in each; and about this time the word temperance began to lose its normal signification, and to be used as a synonym for total abstinence from the use of liquors. Teetotalism became the popular cry. The country was taken by storm; lecturers loomed up all over the States, administered the “pledge” publicly to hundreds of thousands; various minor denominations refitted their terms of communion in accordance with the new war-cry. In Ireland the cause of total abstinence was so successfully advocated by Very Rev. Father Mathew that he is stated to have administered the pledge to more than a million persons within three years from 1838; and since that time there has been, in the popular mind, no such thing as temperance, except in the sense of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate. All the former associations which proposed to themselves any such secondary and inefficient object as moderation in the use of liquors, or which administered either a partial pledge or one merely for a specified time, were disbanded or fell out of sight. Societies of Washingtonians, Sons of Temperance, Good Templars, and Rechabites sprang up, most of them secret and with signs, passwords, grips, tokens, etc., the members of which were pledged neither to touch, taste, handle, buy, sell, manufacture, nor use as a beverage the accursed thing. In 1851 the Legislature of Maine passed the well-known “Maine Law,” by which it was made penal to manufacture, have in possession, or sell intoxicating drinks. The law was repealed in 1856, and it has since been lawful to distil, keep, or sell spirits under certain restrictions, but drinking-houses are prohibited. A similar law was enacted in Massachusetts in 1867. In many of the States there is a law prohibiting the sale of liquors on Sunday, and in a majority the local-option law (which leaves the question whether license to sell spirits shall be granted or not to the decision, at the polls, of the people of each city, town, township, or county) is now in full blast, with results that we shall glance at hereafter. A political party has been formed in many States, under the name of “prohibitionists,” which, though as yet but rarely sufficiently numerous or powerful to elect a governor on that single issue, yet numbers adherents enough frequently to hold the balance of power between the two prominent parties, and thus extort from candidates very important concessions in their own interests. They are active, energetic, conscientious in the main, and they besiege the various legislatures with petition upon petition against the liquor-traffic, which, to their minds, is the sum of all iniquities. The various religious sects come to their aid, loudly decrying all traffic in, and use of, spirituous drink. Matters have been brought to such a pass that a man’s reputation is imperilled by taking a glass of liquor; and there is yet wanting but the one further step of making its use illegal and its procurement impossible—a course strongly and unhesitatingly urged by almost all the various supporters of what is nowadays called temperance, and which seems quite likely to succeed, should the upholders of these views increase in numbers for a few more years as they have done within the last two decades.

It is a law of all fanatical movements, and one of their most peculiarly dangerous features, that they readily enmesh large numbers of people, and that their workings, tendencies, and developments fall of necessity, in the long run, into the hands of the extremists, the intransigentes, among themselves. Nor has this movement proved an exception, as is seen in the attempt made by legal enactment to coerce people into the practice of an enforced abstinence from stimulants—an abstinence not shown to be physiologically desirable, not commanded by the church, and most assuredly not inculcated in Scripture. But in secret societies always, in sectarian combinations generally, and oftentimes in political parties, the experience of all ages shows that people first set up for themselves a master, and then obey him like so many slaves. They do this, too, under the delusion, for the most part, that they are carrying out their own convictions of right. It is much easier to join one of these secret organizations in a flush of curiosity, enthusiasm, or other temporary excitement than it afterwards proves to leave them in calm blood. Ties of acquaintance and quasi friendship have been formed which most men strongly dislike to break. Good care is usually exercised that “the rhetorician, from whom,” as Aristotle says, “it is an error to expect demonstration,” shall be on hand to stimulate, exhort, inspirit, and incite to still further and more vigorous exertion; the boundaries between right and wrong fade away from the mental view; and few start in on this false track who fail to accompany their misled companions as far as the archbigot or archfanatic may choose to take them.

Within the Catholic Church a large number of total-abstinence societies have been formed, of course with her sanction. Most of these are at the same time beneficial institutions, which in case of sickness give the member, and in case of death to his nearest kin, a certain allotted sum. But probably most priests on the mission will say that the great mass of Catholics who feel the necessity for them of such abstinence take the pledge as individuals at the hands of the priest, either for a certain term or for life, without joining any special society. An immense amount of good has thus been accomplished, particularly among the poorer and laboring population, a very large proportion of whom are Catholics, and, from their circumstances and inevitable surroundings, most in danger of falling into temptation in the matter of drink, as well as most certain to suffer very severely from its effects. But it has at no time been, nor is it now, any part of the teaching of the church that her children shall not manufacture, buy, sell, and use (should they be so disposed) vinous, malt, or spirituous drink. Condemning the abuse of them, and reprobating drunkenness as a mortal sin, she yet allows to her children the moderate use and enjoyment of that wine which our Blessed Lord himself made for the use of the guests at the wedding at Cana, as well as of the other forms of it, which no physician or chemist ever found to be injurious per se until it chimed in with a cry emanating from a large, an influential, possibly a well-meaning, but in our view certainly, if so, a false-thinking, or it may be a deceived, portion of the community.

And here it may be well to note the unpardonable arrogance of assumption with which the intemperately temperate of all sorts take it for granted that all intelligence and morality belong peculiarly to those who inculcate or practise this one principle of abstinence from liquors. We see it displayed most offensively, indeed, among the variously bedizened and becollared gentry of the divers oath-bound secret societies, and among such sectaries as practically make total abstinence a term of communion; but truth compels us to go further, and to admit the tendency, even among Catholics, on the part of those who have ardently attached themselves to the societies got up with this view, to treat all outsiders as though living on a lower plane of piety and morality than themselves. “Stand thou off, for I am holier than thou” is too frequently their language in effect, if not in words; and, indeed, that is an almost inevitable effect of what the Scotch call “unco guidness.” However, the teaching and tenets of the church remain what they have always been, and the Catholic manufacturer or vender of wines and spirits, the total abstainer and the moderate drinker, go to confession, receive absolution and holy communion, together; nor do intelligent or well-instructed Catholics imagine for a moment that the formal pledge of abstinence from intoxicants, or membership in a total-abstinence society, are anything more than adminicula to the individual whom his own weakness, the circumstances under which he earns a livelihood, or other reasons place in peculiar danger with reference to this vice.

But there must be some strong reason why an all-pervading necessity has been felt, in this century, for doing something in regard to drunkenness, the need of which (if ever previously perceived) has certainly never been acted upon by the most enlightened nations, whether of antiquity or of modern times. Lot was made drunk; Noe was drunk; Nabal and the Ephraimites were “drunken withal”; and all the evils and phenomena of intoxication are fully described in various passages of the Old Testament, always with reprobation, but there is not to be found in the entire book the slightest disapproval of the use of the fruit of the vine. On the contrary, oblations of wine to the Deity are enjoined upon the children of Israel; and the most horrible judgments denounced by the prophets of God upon the Jews consist in their being deprived of wine. In New Testament times our Saviour was called by the Pharisees (the prototypes of our ultra-abstainers) a wine-bibber; yet the same Jesus does not deem it at all necessary to proclaim himself on the teetotal side, or to leave us any precept against the use of wine. On the contrary, he institutes in wine the sacrament of his love, thus rendering the manufacture of wine necessary till the end of time. He himself changes water into wine. His apostles nowhere discourage its use, while they frequently speak of and upbraid professing Christians with its abuse, and one of them actually advises another to drop water and use a little wine for sanitary reasons. It would be sheer waste of time to undertake to refute those very ignorant or very dishonest persons who try to make it appear that wine, when mentioned in Scripture with commendation, is merely the unfermented juice of the grape, and that the shechar, tirosh, and yayin were only intoxicating when excess in their use was reprobated. Either these people know better, and are wittingly making use of a dishonest argument, or their ignorance is too dense to be penetrated by any proof, however cogent. The reader who may wish to see this branch of the subject succinctly yet exhaustively treated should refer to an article in the Westminster Review for January, 1875, entitled “The Bible and Strong Drink.”

The Greeks and Romans cultivated the vine very largely, made and used wine habitually; but their whole literature, while teeming with reference to the use, in no single instance commends the abuse, of wine. That the Spartans were accustomed to make their slaves intoxicated, in order by their example to deter young men from becoming addicted to the vice, is as well attested as any fact in history; while even in the worst periods of Roman story drunkenness is invariably referred to as disgraceful in itself, never to be predicated of people entitled to respect, and relegated, even at the Saturnalia, to the rabble and to slaves.

In the Stromata of St. Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the latter part of the second century, we find allusion made to a few who at that day attempted to disturb the harmony of the church by imitating the example which they professed to consider set them in the narration by the Prophet Jeremias of the story of the sons of Jonadab-ben-Rechab, and we find those persons classed by him with those of whom the apostle speaks, as “commanding to abstain from that which God hath ordained to be received with thanksgiving.” Two centuries later St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine both pointedly condemn, as acting “plainly and palpably contrary to Scripture and to the doctrine of the Church,” some who, fancying they had attained spiritual information not generally accessible, tried to introduce among Christians the vow of the Nazarites. From that time till the former half of the present century we read, indeed, of drunkenness as existing; for that matter, we know of its existence in the earliest ages, and in all times and countries since, just as we do of incontinence, of theft, and of suicide by poison. It was reserved for the nineteenth century to attempt to do away with the possibility of the vice of drunkenness by rendering penal the production of the means; which is as though the law should step in to render men chaste by emasculation, theft impracticable by the abolition of property; and not in the least more feasible than would be the carrying out of an edict against the production of animal, mineral, or vegetable poisons.

Now, we should not in the least object to any well-devised and practical legislation that would do away with drunkenness entirely, if that were possible, which it unfortunately is not; nor will it ever be the case so long as the human race exists upon earth. The question, then, arises, What would be practical legislation in the matter? This, in turn, involves an inquiry into the latent causes of the great commotion raised within this generation on the subject. It will be fresh in the memory of reading people in the United States that some two years ago one of our ablest metropolitan journals employed an agent to purchase samples of every possibly adulterable commodity from the most reputable venders in that city, drugs of the same description from the most respectable apothecaries—in short, specimens of everything on sale that was capable of deterioration by admixture of foreign substances; and that, on handing them over to a competent chemist for analysis, there was not a single instance of an article so purchased and tested that was not found adulterated to the last extent. All, without exception, whether articles of food, drink, medicine, or products of the arts and manufactures, were debased and corrupted—always, of course, with an inferior and cheaper, frequently with an absolutely injurious, and in some instances with a poisonous, admixture. The exposure occupied the columns of the paper referred to for some two weeks, and was then discontinued; not, however, without leaving food for reflection in the minds of the thoughtful. Now, when we consider the still greater temptation, the patent feasibility, and the larger gains resulting from adulteration of the various liquors, owing to the many hands through which they must and do pass before reaching their consumers, and the almost total impossibility, as things are, of detection, we shall have strong reason à priori to believe that such adulteration takes place. But we have before us at this moment a book of some two hundred pages, entitled the Bar-keeper’s Manual, in which the facts are laid down, the method explained, the ingredients unblushingly named, the manipulations described, and a clear reason thus afforded why the use of liquors nowadays is so ruinous to health, so productive of hitherto comparatively unknown forms of disease, and has become in this century especially such a crying abomination. In this book (which forcibly recalls to our mind an advertisement for “a man in a liquor store” that we once saw, and which wound up by stating that no one need apply who did not understand “doctoring” liquors) recipes are given for making from common whiskey any kind of gin, brandy, rum, arrack, kirschwasser, absinthe, etc., as well as any other desired brand of whiskey; together with full directions for mixing, diluting, coloring, adding strength, bead, and fruitiness, as well as for flavoring them each up to the required mark. When we find among the ingredients recommended (and evidently used, as the result of experience in this diabolical laboratory) nux vomica, cocculus indicus, strychnia, henbane, poppy-seed, creosote, and logwood, to impart strength to the false liquor, we need not inquire after the thousand other less pernicious articles used to supply color, odor, or bead to the noxious compounds. Now, from conversations held with persons who have been engaged in the liquor business in its various forms, as well as from reliable information long since spread before the public, but to quote which in extenso would occupy too much space, we may generalize these facts, which we take to be not only undisputed but indisputable; viz., that wines never, and brandies, gins, etc., rarely, reach our shores in their pure state; that the same assertion is true of every imported liquor; that the subsequent adulteration is something fearful to contemplate; and that the advocates of prohibitory laws are talking within bounds when they call such preparations poisons. We may further learn that rarely indeed do our home-manufactured liquors pass in a pure state into the hands of the first purchaser; and that, after they have passed through two or three subsequent hands, whatever they may have become, they are anything in the world but pure liquors. By the time, then, that they reach the small groceries, drinking-shops, doggeries, and the lowest classes of saloons, all liquors will, on an average, have passed through at least seven or eight hands, each man quite as eager as the last to make all the gain he possibly can upon the article; and adulteration (he has the Manual before him) presenting the safest and easiest plan, it follows that the laborer or artisan, those whose poverty forces them to frequent the lowest and meanest places, will be supplied with the most villanous article possible to be conceived under the name of liquor. Mr. Greenwood, in his work, The Seven Plagues of London, says:

“Where there is no pure liquor—and there is little such in London, even for the wealthy—perhaps nothing used by man as a stimulant is liable to greater and more injurious adulterations than gin; and I assert that it is not to-day to be procured pure (I speak not of merely injurious but) of absolutely poisonous drugs at a single shop in London to which a poor man would go or where he would be served.”

Mr. Nathaniel Curtis, the founder and first Worthy Chief of the Order of Good Templars, has (though his deductions from the facts are entirely different from ours) made it abundantly evident that the adulteration of all liquors, fermented, vinous, and ardent, is carried on in a most reckless manner and without regard to consequences in our own country. His words are:

“From the tramp’s glass of beer, through the sot’s glass of rum, jorum of whiskey, or pull of gin, up to the merchant’s madeira or sherry and the millionaire’s goblet of champagne, we have shown them all to be, not what the drinker supposes—and that were bad enough in all conscience—but universally drugged, most frequently poisoned, and not in one case of ten thousand containing more than a small percentage of the article the purchaser paid for.”

We might multiply authorities, chemical, medical, and purely statistic, on this subject to an indefinite extent, but it would occupy too much space; besides which, reading men are already sufficiently convinced of the facts. Within the last few years such a mass of damning evidence has been put before the public on this subject that the man must be wilfully blind who does not admit adulteration of the most injurious sort to be the rule in all the various branches and phases of the liquor-traffic. One quotation, however, we must make from the pages of the Dublin Review, July, 1870, article “Protestant London,” in which the writer suggests something very like our own view, though he seems to have an idea that the wholesale adulteration was, in England, confined to fermented liquors, which is indeed a grave mistake, whether as regards England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, or in fact any of the countries peculiarly afflicted by this demon of drink. The writer says:

“Yet the effects of beer in England are confessedly far worse than those of wine in France. We believe the real explanation of this to be its adulteration. It is by drinking, at first in moderation, adulterated beer that the habit of intoxication becomes a slavery, by which men are afterwards led on to the abuse of gin. There are at this moment thousands of habitual drunkards among us who would never have been drunkards at all, had they not been betrayed into the snare by drinking in moderation adulterated beer—that is, if the beer sold in public-houses were not universally adulterated. This evil, at least, law well administered might meet and uproot. Government should not allow men both to cheat and poison their neighbors with impunity.”

It is, then, not at all surprising that mania a potu, delirium tremens, and other disorders arising from the abuse of good or the use of drugged liquor should have become so common in this country as to furnish a good or, at any rate, a plausible reason why many conscientious persons have attributed to the use of liquor effects due, either solely or in great measure, to the stupefying and poisonous decoctions vended under that name. But while this would have been, at all times as it is now, an excellent and an all-sufficient reason for trying to induce people to refrain, whether by pledge or otherwise, from such infernal compounds, and for having analysts appointed by law to examine and test the liquors sold in every tavern, we insist that it is no argument at all for doing away by law with the use of liquor in toto. We believe sincerely that no single measure (that can be carried out) would do more to lessen the national curse of drunkenness than the appointment of competent chemists to see to the purity of the liquors vended. And, considering the advanced state of chemical science among us, is it absurd to suppose, that if the government were determined that so it should be, the selling of adulterated liquor might not easily be made so dangerous a trade as to be very soon given over? It is lamentable that people are so eager for gain that they will and do adulterate everything capable of the process. Physicians tell us that it is nearly impossible to get at the ordinary drug-stores any of the higher-priced medicines in their pure state; that opium, quinine, etc., are nearly always impure, mixed with foreign ingredients; and that, for this reason, their prescriptions often fail of the intended effect. This, certainly, is no good reason for enacting a law to abolish entirely the use of adulterable drugs; nor because tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, mace, mustard, and pepper are rarely found pure should we therefore abandon their use altogether.

Here, of course, it will be contended that the cases are not parallel; that whereas the abuse of liquor, or the use of the drugged article going by that name, renders man like the brute, degrades and obliterates the image of God in us, yet such is not the case with the adulterated commodities of food or with the drugs referred to. True, the analogy does not hold equally good throughout in each case, but the principle is exactly the same in all. We will go further, admitting that liquor is in very few cases an absolute necessity; but what a large number of mankind regard it as of prime importance to their well-being, to their comfort, or, finally, to their enjoyment! How few of the great mass of humanity, on the other hand, are of that unfortunate constitution of mind, of body, or of both that they cannot restrain themselves within the bounds of moderation in the use of liquor vinous or fermented! Suppose even that the passage of a prohibitory law by the majority were consonant with church and Scriptural teachings, would it be fair or reasonable that for the lamentable weakness of the very few the comfort and enjoyment of the vast mass of humanity should be lightly set aside as an unconsidered trifle? That Anglican bishop who said he “would rather see England free than England sober” expressed a noble sentiment, and we think, with him, that enforced sobriety (as would be that produced by such a law) would be dearly purchased at the expense of virtual slavery. Some one pithily condemns that false system of morality that begins by pledges of total abstinence, but the falsity of such a scheme is trifling compared with that which would invite us to come and admire a nation sober, enforcedly sober, de par la loi! As well ask us to applaud the sobriety of the convicts in the penitentiary. We are not placed in the world to be free from temptation, but to resist it. All theologians assure us that this is a state of probation, nor is it the business of the civil code either to abolish property lest many may steal, or to suppress the manufacture of liquor lest some shame themselves and sin against God by getting drunk. Again, if you begin this business, where is it to end? Human beings are very full of kinks and crotchets. Each half-century is sure to have its peculiar vagary. What may not be that of the next one? King James considered tobacco as a direct emanation from the devil; and John Wesley was no whit behind him either in the belief or its expression. It is certainly quite as unnecessary, quite as much an article de pur luxe, as beer, wine, or spirits. Who is bail to me that, the principle once established of suppressing human nature by act of Congress, future Good Templars, prospective Rechabites, Sons of Temperance yet to come, nay, the whole Methodistic fraternity, may not revivify the views of Wesley and thunder anathemas against Yaras, Fine-cut, and Cavendish? Or there may arise an expounder of Scripture who shall deduce thence a system of vegetarianism (quite as unlikely doctrines and practices have been deduced from Holy Writ) to his own satisfaction and that of crowds greater than wait on the ministrations of our latest evangelists. Of course then, marshalled to victory by the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” they will soon have a law enacted forbidding to us all beefsteak or mutton-chop! There is, in short, no end to the antics and absurdities that may, nay, that must, arise under the ægis of such a precedent as this law would furnish. We, for our part, fully believe in rendering to Cæsar what belongs to him; but it is the province of the church, representing God upon earth—of religion, in other words—so to dispose man as to enable him to withstand temptation to sin and crime; and the business of the civil power to punish him for offences committed, not to remove all temptation to wrongdoing. In short, the law is not held to an impossibility, which this would plainly be, unless the world were made a tabula rasa. The assumption, therefore, by the civil law, of the divinely-conferred duty and prerogative of the church would, in any case, be a usurpation, were it even practicable. We shall see that in the case before us, at least, it would be purely impossible to carry out the legal mandate by all the power of the government, were it multiplied a hundred-fold.

The heavy tariff on foreign, and the large internal revenue tax on domestic, liquors, necessitated by our civil war, have also been a great inducement to the adulteration of spirits, as well as to the advance of that already too wide-spread practice of cheating the government in matter of revenue, now so common as hardly to be regarded in the light of a moral wrong. Howsoever it may have come about, the fact is that the tone of political morality with us is about as low as it has ever been in any country that the sun shines on. From the Stocking & Leet trial, through the troubles of Tammany’s magnates and the charges of complicity with smugglers pending against some of our most prominent mercantile firms, down to the “crooked whiskey” cases of to-day, as well as the constantly-bandied and the sometimes thoroughly proven charges of bribery against our most highly-placed public men, we see everywhere either a desperate resolution to evade all law, or a serene belief that deception and the withholding of tax and tariff legally due cease to be cheating and swindling when the government is the party of the second part. It is now clearly made out that, since the laying on of high duties and revenue tax, it has cost our government an average of three dollars to collect every two dollars received from that source in the public treasury; while as to the amount of which the government is annually defrauded, no calculation other than an approximate one can, of course, be made, but those whose position gives them the best chance to form an accurate judgment place the yearly sum at the minimum of $80,000,000. Before our late war we had a federal treasury ever full. Indeed, but a very short time before that dismal experience the general government distributed a large surplus among the States; our treasury notes were always above par, and our simple government bonds at high premium. With the advent of war came the necessity for raising a large and an immediate revenue. Taxation, direct and indirect, was resorted to, the like of which has rarely (if ever) been known in civilized countries. Paper money, redeemable at the pleasure of the government, was issued. Gold and silver entirely disappeared. An army of internal revenue officers had to be created, and a supplementary host of detectives to ferret out infractions of the new-made laws. The tax on common whiskey was placed at two dollars and fifty cents per gallon, and corresponding sums on foreign liquors; Cognac, for example, being rated at seven dollars per gallon. Our people were not accustomed to, and did not like, taxation; and the government neither knew how to suggest, nor its officials how to carry out honestly and skilfully, any well-devised plans for the collection of revenue on such a gigantic scale. Here there was a strong inducement at once both to the illicit manufacture and to the increased adulteration of liquors, the latter of which (though existing too largely before) took, from that time, large strides in advance, and both have uninterruptedly continued their progress till the present day, threatening (unless most stringent measures be taken for their repression) to ruin our country, morally, and a large number of her citizens temporally and eternally. It is true that the tax on home-manufactured spirits was largely cut down in 1870, and that on foreign wines and liquors heavily curtailed; but those at all acquainted with the subject know how little this step, taken after eight years of the reverse practice, was likely to interfere with clandestine manufacture, and how immensely it tended to give a superadded impetus to the practice of adulteration. Our internal revenue officers are now legion, yet they do not collect one-half of the revenue that should be collected; and of that one-half not more than two-fifths inures to the benefit of the treasury. Our detectives swarm everywhere, yet illicit distillation and poisonous adulteration of liquors are on a very rapid increase. Now, a very large number of people, learned and lay, rich and poor, of practical experience in the use of liquor, and deriving their information from the experience of others, or from reading, are strongly of the opinion that the best and most practicable mode of decreasing actual drunkenness, and of mitigating or diminishing the acknowledged evils of drink, would be the furnishing of pure liquors instead of the noxious compounds now on sale. Certainly, to put the matter in the mildest terms, there prevails a very extensive belief, founded, we think, upon good reason, that if pure liquors alone were sold drunkenness would not prevail as it now does. It is not contended that intoxication would thereby be done away with, any more than that the most skilful devices can ever entirely prevent theft, forgery, murder, or other crime; but we insist that the tendency to drunkenness, now so inseparable (as experience shows) from the use of the drugged article, would not exist in a tithe of the instances nor to a hundredth part of the extent that we daily see. Certain it is that in the last century, and until adulteration began to prevail extensively in the present, the terrific effects of liquor-drinking now known to us, under so many different names and forms of disease, did not present themselves with any frequency; and it is equally certain that just in proportion to the universality of adulteration has been the commonness and virulence of mania and delirium resulting from drink. We have said that stringent measures should be taken to guard the interests of the comparatively helpless consumers, so that they may have some reasonable ground for believing that in taking a glass of ale or beer they have not imbibed a dose of cocculus indicus, that a drink of whiskey does not of necessity imply an undefined amount of nux vomica, or that the symptoms resultant from a mixture of brandy and water at dinner are not due to strychnia or creosote. We found it much easier during the war to raise prices on account of the enhanced value of gold than it has since proved to diminish them in accordance with the approximation of greenbacks to coin. So, too, in this matter of suppressing adulteration of drink (which is the remedy we propose, and which will be just so far valuable as it is thorough and uncompromising, while comparatively useless unless rigidly and strenuously carried out), we have called into play a practice, we have evoked a demon, which is not to be abolished or banished by feeble instrumentality. We shall illustrate what may be done here in our own country by what has been successfully accomplished in Sweden (a country in which drunkenness and its attendant evils had attained a magnitude beyond, perhaps, any other of Europe); nor can we do it better than by the following account taken from Dr. Carnegie’s late book, entitled The License Laws of Sweden:

“In the town of Gothenburg, however, these measures (prohibitory laws), partly from local reasons, were not found sufficiently restrictive; and a committee, appointed in 1865, readily traced a concurrent progress between the increasing pauperism and the increasing drink. The laws were evaded, the police set at naught, and nothing remained but to inaugurate a radically new system. This consisted of various measures, all subordinate to one great principle—viz., that no individual, either as proprietor or manager, under a public-house license, should derive any gain from the sale of liquor. To carry out this principle in its integrity the whole liquor-traffic of the town was gradually transferred to a company, limited, consisting of the most highly respected gentlemen of the town, who undertook, by their charter, to carry on the business in the interests of temperance and morality, and neither to derive any profit from it themselves nor to allow any person acting under them to do so. The company now rent all the houses and licenses from the town, paying a moderate interest on the capital invested, and making over the entire profits of the trade to the town treasury. The places for drink—the number of which was immediately curtailed—are of two classes, public-houses and retail shops, both bound to purchase their wine and spirits (analyzed and authoritatively pronounced pure) from the company, to sell them without any profit, to supply good food and hot meals on the premises, and not to sell Swedish brandy except at meals. The public-houses are managed by carefully-chosen men, who derive their profits from the sale of malt liquors (also analyzed before being put on sale), coffee, tea, soda and seltzer water, cigars, etc., and from the food and lodgings. The retail shops are managed entirely by women, who have a fixed salary but no share in the profits. This system began to work in October, 1865. Its effects have been at once perceptible. In 1864 the number of fines paid in Gothenburg for drunkenness was 2,164; in 1870, with a largely increased population, 1,416. Cases of delirium tremens in 1864 were 118; in 1868 but 54. Nor are the financial effects less encouraging. In 1872 the company realized in net profits no less than £15,846, which, being paid over to the town, far more than covers the entire poor-rate. Another pleasant fact is that this large amount of trade is virtually carried on without any paid-up capital, the whole outlay of the company having only amounted to £454.”

It is interesting to learn from the same authority whence the above extract is taken that whilst the consumption of liquor in Sweden is still enormous, it has been reduced (mainly owing to the care exercised in testing its purity, and partially, also, to well-regulated restriction) from ten gallons per head throughout the kingdom in 1860 to about two gallons in 1870, which is about the same proportion as in Scotland at present; and that the universal testimony of the Swedish philanthropists, far from favoring absolute prohibition, looks rather to purity of liquor, conjoined with moderate restriction, and finds the results eminently satisfactory. But while we point to their experience, as well as to common sense, right reason, the practice both of the ancient and modern world till the beginning of this agitation of a factitious temperance; while we invoke the teachings of Scripture for those who profess to be guided in matters of morals and doctrine by that, and by that alone, and appeal to the constant practice and to the authority of the church, which should, with Catholics, be paramount to all other considerations, yet we are painfully aware that to produce conviction in the minds of extremists is a task that no logic can accomplish. It is, like the cure of the vice itself which gives occasion for this article, only to be accomplished by the grace of God. The English-speaking world—the most enterprising and energetic portion of the human race—occupying, for the most part, regions which suggest toiling and striving physically and mentally so as, in the opinion of many of them, to necessitate an occasional resort to alcoholic stimulants, have used these liquors largely, we will say too largely, if you please. Other shrewd and unscrupulous Anglo-Saxons have stepped in and poisoned, for gain, the cup which they thought one of refreshment. Death and disease, drunkenness and dipsomania, have been so long and so frequently the result that the attention of the public is imperatively called to it. “Take the pledge,” says one; “that will settle the matter”—forgetting that without the help of God no pledge is of any account, and that with his grace no pledge is needed. “Join the order,” bawls another; “here you find the sovereign panacea for drink”—oblivious of the fact that these secret institutions are never permanent, rarely at peace within themselves, constantly shifting in views and practice, and that in joining them the neophyte simply takes as many masters as there are members, exchanging the slavery to drink for one still more galling and quite as sinful. “No license to sell less than a quart,” says yet another. The quart is soon disposed of, and many another quart and gallon go the same road. “Sell no liquor, open no drinking-house on Sunday,” screams a full-throated chorus of religionists. This, too, is tried, and the poor man, obliged to choose between entire dulness and intoxication, prepares himself on Saturday night for a Sunday’s drinking bout. “No license less than three hundred dollars,” suggest the cannie property-holders; and, presto! higher adulteration; more poison in the drink; a higher rate per glass, it may be, but not a tippling-shop less in country or city. “No license at all,” is the next cry. It is tried; adulteration becomes still more barefaced, but the same amount of drinking is done, it can hardly be said clandestinely, for it is done in the face of day, and everybody knows or may know of it. Macrae’s America tells us that when an investigation was instituted into the workings of the prohibitory or no-license system in Boston, there were found to be in that city over two thousand places where liquor was vended by the glass, and that the average annual amount spent per head (men, women, and children included) for liquor in the entire State was a little over ten dollars. “We’re all for the Maine Law here,” said a man to Mr. Macrae, “but we’re agin its enforcement.” It may here be stated once for all, without possibility of successful contradiction, that not one of these laws, whether for Sunday-closing, higher license, no license, partial license, or entire prohibition, ever was carried out, or ever had any other effect than possibly to add to the cost, and certainly to enlarge illicit distillation and set an enhanced premium on the adulteration of liquors.

Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi!

Maine was obliged, after a few years’ trial, to abrogate her prohibitory law; and the most ardent favorers of local option, which has now had a full and fair trial in many States, confess it a failure. Our own experience of it is that drunkenness is nowhere so rife as in the midst of those very regions where no license is granted and entirely prohibitory laws are supposed to prevail; and there is surplusage of testimony to the facts.

Strange, certainly, it seems to us, that among the various modes, some plausible and some supremely silly, that have been proposed and acted upon with a view of checking the ravages of intemperance, so few should have suggested, and none should have acted upon the idea of trying, what might be the possible effect of pure liquor. Common sense should have at once suggested it, and a portion of the redundant and exuberant philanthropy of the age might have been well, at least harmlessly, employed in making an experiment which could in no case have worked disastrously, as all those plans have done which familiarize the people with systematized violation of law, to gratify the morbid craving for those poisons the use of which, growing with every indulgence, soon leaves the victim incapable of resisting the craving that never abandons him but with life. Most people, however, once fairly inoculated with the views of the temperance societies (we refer to the secret institutions under that name), see everything but from one point of view; the vision becomes jaundiced, prejudice carries the day, argument is of no avail, moderate measures are futile, liquor in any shape, alcohol in any quantity, are the accursed thing, and those who deal in them, nay, those who see no objection to their use, are Amalekites. What to them are the vested interests of the eight hundred thousand persons engaged in the manufacture and sale of liquor in the United States alone? What the employment of hundreds of thousands engaged in its transportation? What care they about the wives and families of either? It is of no sort of consequence to them that over sixty million dollars accrue to the federal treasury, even under the present extremely defective system of collection, from the tax on domestic liquors; half as much more from the tariff on foreign wines and spirits; and that the amounts paid for municipal, county, State, and federal purposes, by license on liquor-selling and drinking-houses, are simply incalculable. As well plant and try to cultivate the sands from high-water mark to ebb-tide as attempt to reason with such people! They are the communists of our country, the impracticables, the men of one idea, and that idea a wrong one. We would much like to be able to reach them, to be able to make them hear the words of genuine truth and soberness; but they are “joined to their idols,” as Ephraim of old; the doctrines of the “lodge,” the rulings of the W. Patriarch, W. Chief Templar (or whatever else may be the name of the presiding Grand Mogul), are of more avail to them than all the philosophy and all the logic of ancient and modern times. What are the Fathers of the church to the Rev. Boanerges Blunderbuss, at Brimstone Corner, who explains to the satisfaction of his hearers that wine, “which cheers the heart of God and of man,” is but the unfermented juice of the grape, and that our Saviour, at his last supper, squeezed out some three or four clusters of grapes into the goblet whence he and his disciples drank? Talk to one of these people about the desirableness of some regard for the habits and customs of the multitudes in this wide world who use wine and spirits without abusing them; he regards you with a withering contempt for your ignorance, and informs you that they are all drunkards and must be reformed; that if five glasses of wine make a man drunk, one-half of a glass must make him one-tenth part drunk; that liquor is never necessary, even in disease as a remedy; that the Good Samaritan was really poisoning the poor fellow to whom he gave the wine; and he leaves on your mind the general impression that Solomon had yet a great deal to learn from Sons of Temperance and prohibitory-law men when he over-hastily recommended in his Proverbs to “give drink to the sorrowful.” Just as impracticable, though in a different way and for a different reason, is the man who has no sympathy for habits and needs which he never knew; who never had a generous impulse in his life; whose every act is based on cold reason and personal interest; who seldom or never took, and who never longed for, a glass of wine since his wedding-day; who has no sympathy for those differently situated in life or of different physiological diathesis. He has neither genuine sympathy for the unfortunate drunkard nor fellow-feeling for those who use liquor. Mistaking oftentimes his own plentiful surroundings for honesty, the want of temptation for temperance, and his own success in life for virtue, we need expect from him no other cry than “do away with the whole thing.”

Those poor degraded wretches at the other extreme of society who, from congenital inclination, bad surroundings, evil training, folly, disease, or the gnawing remorse engendered by failure in life, have fallen a prey to the accursed poisons sold as drink, their intellect shattered and their physical constitution prostrate, do not, we confess, deserve a very ardent sympathy from a community for which they have done little but harm. Still, that community was to blame that received money for licensing the houses that sold them narcotics instead of beer, henbane instead of wine, and liquid damnation for strong drink. It is, at least, a duty which we owe in future to all who can control themselves that, when they ask for bread, they shall not be furnished with a stone.

We are very anxious not to be misunderstood. This article is not intended to be either a recommendation of, or an excuse for, tippling habits, still less as an argument in favor of the drinking usages of the last century or of any other period distinguished for copious drinking. The personal habits and practice of the writer are opposed entirely to the use of wine, beer, or spirits. His profession does not render them necessary nor his taste crave them, and he would that in this one respect the world “were altogether such as” he is; but he cannot ignore the fact that all men are not so constituted physically, so situated in a worldly point of view, or mentally disposed in the same way. What all can clearly see is that a cry is being raised, an attempt being made, to add in a clandestine and illegitimate way something that shall in effect be tantamount to a precept, and that this something so foisted upon us is opposed to the practice of the church, consequently to the Scriptures. We see that this cry has become fashionable, a fear of being reckoned with the “vulgar herd” (for drunkenness is a vice of the vulgar) or a fear of giving offence causing many to be silent who should “cry aloud and not spare,” lest haply the harm may be done and it be too late for the remedy. Now, the whole clamor, save in so far as it inveighs against drunkenness, “the disgrace of man and the mother of misery,” proceeds on the false hypotheses, 1, that the Holy Scripture discountenances the moderate use of liquor; 2, that the church opposes it; 3, that the ancient philosophers condemned it; 4, that it is injurious in health; 5, that it is valueless as a remedy in sickness; and, 6, that prohibitory laws should be passed forthwith forbidding under penalty the manufacture, purchase, sale, or importation of wine, beer, or spirits. Not a single one of these assertions is true, or has about it the semblance of verisimilitude to any but the average brain of the secret-society affilié, or the fungus that stands in the place of a heart for the bigoted sectary. Were they every one true, we should still be opposed to the manner in which it is attempted to carry them into effect; fully believing, as we do, that the whole matter of personal reform lies within the domain of the church, upon which region the civil power has no right to trench. Of course the state has a perfect and undisputed right to tax wines, liquors, etc., like all other articles of luxury, to any extent she may deem advisable, either for revenue or repression of habits of expense among her citizens. But, inseparably bound up with this right, and as a corollary from it, it is the duty of the state to see that the article or articles for allowing the sale of which she receives revenue shall not injure, much less ruin, her citizens; and it is in the performance of this duty that we affirm government to have been totally remiss and delinquent. Had it been otherwise, and had the state been half as anxious to perform her duty as she has been always eager to claim her right, there never would have been the faintest plausibility in the cry raised; no agitation could have resulted; with her performance of the duty the clamor must, of necessity, cease, and with it those secret societies, so powerless for good, so potential for evil, that have been evoked by it.

There is, however, no limit in our age to the power of clap-trap, of a cry well started and persistently kept up. Back such a cry by the unremitting efforts of a few secret organizations, which demagogues well know how to use as a means of climbing into power, and superadd the influence of some of the sects, it deepens to a howl, and a careless or lethargic community is easily induced to believe that there must be some reason for the clamor; that what so many people say must be true; that where so much smoke exists there must have been a fire at some time; and, finally, that the object on which so many persons seem to have set their minds, to carry which so many are combined, must be a good one. From this point to supporting it with vote and influence the step is an easy one. Hence it is that, absurd as is the proposal of those who favor Congressional prohibitory laws touching liquor, we feel no certainty that its unreasonableness will prove a barrier to its being at some time put into effect. We have indicated previously that there exists, even among Catholics, who should know better, a lurking notion that in joining the T. B. A. or any of its congeners, they take a step forward in holiness, approach nearer to the imitation of the Saviour, and outstrip in piety those who remain outside the institution using (and able to enjoy without abusing) “the liberty wherewith Christ has made them free.” Now, this is false, and consequently is not Catholic doctrine or feeling. It is according to the doctrine of the church, with which the practice of Catholics must agree, that should the experience of any individual prove to him that total abstinence from drink is in his special case easier than moderation in its use, and that he ought, consequently, not to use liquor at all; and if, in addition, he is clearly of opinion that this, his proper course, is much facilitated by joining a Catholic temperance association, he has a clear right, nay, it is his duty, to attach himself to it. Further, should a Catholic have a friend, whom he can largely influence, who is becoming over-fond of drink, and whom he judges in conscience he can reclaim by taking with him the pledge of total abstinence, or by accompanying him into any of the Catholic associations got up and recommended for such purposes, the Catholic so doing acts nobly and performs a meritorious work, greater and more laudable just in proportion as he himself was further removed from temptation or danger of fall in the matter of drink. But it is not a bounden duty enjoined on every Catholic Christian to abstain entirely from liquor, much less to join a temperance society; and, except where it is done to save another, as in the case just presented, the Catholic so joining it is no more laudable, certainly, than he who stands aloof, using his God-given liberty in the matter.

While the church, like her divine Lord and Founder, has never forcibly interfered with man’s free-will, yet her entire history proves that her salutary influence has been exerted, and that, too, with the highest success, against every shape in which the sin of luxury has appeared. The Catholic countries of the world are not now, and they never have been, the drunken countries. Drunkards are not found to-day among those who frequent the tribunal of penance; and, with that consistency of action and oneness of doctrine which is found in no other existent institution, the church maintains that against the sin of drunkenness, as against all other forms of sin, there is no thoroughly effectual remedy but the frequentation of her sacraments. Pledges and associations, while sanctioned by her, are regarded as mere adminicula, tending to bring the sinner to the use of confession, the performance of enjoined penance, and the worthy reception of the Blessed Sacrament. Abstinence, whether for a time or for life, she looks upon as a work of perfection, of remedy, or of penance for the individual. The pledge, as administered by her, is neither oath nor vow, but either a resolution taken by one’s self in the presence of another, or at the utmost a solemn promise made to man. While more than fifteen hundred years ago the church anathematized the heresy of the Manicheans, who taught that spirituous liquors are not creatures of God, and that, as they are intrinsically evil, he who uses them is thereby guilty of sin, yet both before and after the rise of that detestable sect all the writings of her fathers and doctors, all the decrees of her synods and councils, all the decisions of her Supreme Pontiffs, and all the labor of her priests have been persistently directed towards teaching her members to “subdue the flesh with its affections and lusts.” How well she succeeded let her conquest to Christianity of the conquering northern barbarian hordes testify. Of these, whose temperament rendered them peculiarly inclined to debauch, whose habits by no means belied their inclinations, and whose besetting sin was drunkenness even after their conversion to the faith, she made sober nations. Acts of Parliament, municipal and other local measures, show us the huge strides toward unbounded intemperance in drink taken by the English people from the time when, in giving up the true church, they abandoned the sacrament of penance; while the same acts, and what we have had of so-called repressive law-tinkering on the same subject in our own country, show us the utter futility of any and every attempt by the civil law to render men moral by statute—to do God’s work without the help of the Omnipotent. Were it even possible for the state to succeed in carrying out the most stringent prohibitory or repressive laws that it ever entered the brain of the wildest or most narrow-minded fanatic to conceive, what would be the result? Simply that people would, like inmates of the work-house or penitentiary, endure privation without practising abstinence. The church of God takes no such ground; and the state can no more succeed in carrying out such measures than did Domitian with his sumptuary decree. Legislators forget what the church always bears carefully in mind and has always inculcated—viz., that drunkenness is the sin not of the drink but of the drunkard. The assertion that alcohol in any form is an emanation of the evil spirit, or the denial of the lawfulness of the use of liquor, is in itself just as much a heresy today as it was in the days of the Egkratites. But, that we may not overrun our limits in pursuing this branch of the subject, we refer such readers as may be anxious to see it fully and ably treated to the valuable little work entitled The Discipline of Drink, by Rev. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R.

It is not, however, from Catholic sources that the proposal emanates to cut off by legal enactment the supply of beer, wine, and spirits, which many people—indeed, the vast majority of the civilized inhabitants of the earth—deem necessary for their health, conducive to their comfort, or desirable for their enjoyment. Such schemes come from the Radicaux enragés; from those who addle their intellects by striving to decipher the mystic number of the Apocalyptic beast; from the men of the George Fox stripe, to whom a steeple-house is the unclean thing; always from men on whom the name of the Church of Rome operates as does the flaunting of a red rag by the picador on the bull in the amphitheatre of Seville; and, finally, from those who believe neither in this nor in anything else that man should hold sacred, but who see and seek in the secret societies, and in the agitation of this and similar questions, a stepping-stone to power and a means of gaining influence.

Were one to judge by the pamphlets and tracts written on the side of the prohibitionists, he would readily suppose that it is admitted on all hands by physicians and chemists that alcohol is of no use as a remedial or curative agent; that it is not food, is not life-sustaining; that no possible good can come out of Nazareth; that the unclean thing is altogether accursed, and should be relegated to the bottomless pit whence it sprang. And, that we may not overburden this article, we shall simply give the conclusion arrived at by a writer in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1875, entitled “The Physiological Influence of Alcohol,” in which the writer (himself a physician, whose yearning to find against us is evident throughout), after an able comparison and summing up of the cases, experiments, and arguments of Doctors Richardson, Thudichum, Dupré, Anstie, and other celebrated authorities, thus perorates:

“The inference is plain. The nutritious capability of alcohol, when used in appropriate circumstances and in reasonable quantity, is yet a matter of controversy, and a question which has yet to be further investigated and weighed by competent scientific authorities before any absolute judgment regarding it can be pronounced that shall be worthy of general acceptance.”

Those who feel any interest in this part of the subject would do well to read the entire article referred to, and we feel convinced that nine out of ten who do so will come to the conclusion, from the data given, that the able writer’s patent bias is what caused the very non-committal wording of his final dictum; while the same number will decide the large preponderance of proof to be in favor of the nutritive qualities of alcohol. We have failed to see in any of the “temperance” documents the remotest hint that there was anything at all to be said in favor of alcohol as an article of nutriment. Is this honest? These people must calculate largely on the gullibility of the public; but they should recollect, too, that the same public, when it once discovers their prevarication, is very ready to apply the proverb, Falsus in uno, etc.

The great Swedish chancellor, Oxenstierna, said to his son: “You do not yet know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” We are in this respect neither better nor worse off than other countries, with perhaps this exception: that our best citizens, those of largest experience and soundest judgment, are too self-respecting, too proud, to descend into the dirty arena of politics, a vast majority of such never having attended a primary meeting in their lives, and many, very many, rarely casting a vote. True, when corruption has run its course, when ring-rule becomes unendurable, this class will sometimes, as lately in New York, arouse itself. Now, the men of one idea, the canters (honest and dishonest), and the knaves are not so. They never miss an opportunity of propagating their views, and it would seem almost as though there were an intimate and necessary connection between the falsity or illiberality of the view and the pertinacity of its upholders in spreading it. Besides, they are not indifferent to, but they hate, broad and liberal views on any subject; they must gauge all humanity by their own instrument, which, while it suits the pint-pot, is but ill adapted to the hogshead. “Les idées générales sont toujours haïes par les idées partielles,” says a French writer to whom (while we by no means agree with him in everything) ability must be conceded. Should people ever have the power to do it—a contingency by no means unlikely in this century, in which the secret societies seem to hold “high carnival” (May a subsequent Lenten time purge the world of such foul humors!)—they will infallibly enact a penal prohibitory law. This will be accomplished by means of the already-organized associations, the oath-bound classes, the pledged abstainers, some of the sects, largely aided by the lethargy and carelessness of people who hold clearer and more correct views. It will be worse than useless to pass such laws, unless provision be made for stringently carrying into effect their details. Suppose that the prohibitory law proposed has been enacted and is vigorously enforced, and let us cursorily examine what is this Golden Age, this antedated millennium promised us so confidently by our over-temperate friends.

A blockade of coast will be necessary, to which the blockade of the Confederate territory during the late war will be as nothing, either for extent of coast to be guarded or for the numbers, ingenuity, and means at the command of the blockade-runners. The Canadian and Mexican borders will require cordons of sentries day and night, to furnish which one hundred armies such as we possess would be ridiculously inadequate. A government detective force of at least one-fourth our adult male population will have to be employed, organized, and paid; and not less than one-half of the remainder will soon be in prison for infraction or evasion of the law. Meanwhile, the revenues will have diminished by fully one-third, while the governmental expenses will have been tenfold increased. The hundreds of thousands who now make a livelihood for themselves and families by the manufacture, transport, and sale of beer, wines, or spirits must find other employment or join the already too numerous army of tramps; and in this case what becomes of the unfortunate families? If the laboring man finds it difficult to procure work now, what will it be then? Taxation must, of necessity, be decoupled; and meantime a large proportion of the population will have come to the conclusion that they are suffering under the most odious of all tyrannies, and will be ripe for revolution. The pretext will not be wanting in the details of carrying out the provisions of the law. This state of things might last, at the utmost, a year, during which insurrections would be of constant occurrence in every part of the country; outbreaks in the cities would take place day after day; and, finally, the minority, in revolution against what they considered an unjust and tyrannical edict, would carry the day either peacefully at the polls (by aggregating to themselves such of the majority as had become convinced of the absurdity of the law) or, sword in hand and at the mouth of the cannon, would revindicate to themselves the rights so wantonly trampled upon. The results of such a victory may be better imagined than described. History, fortunately, has but few examples of such revolutions against the extravagance of over-zealous reform, but those few are terrifically replete with warning.

We wish, then, to insist that no law at all is better by far than a law which, in its nature, cannot be carried into effect. That this is such a law we think manifest on the above showing; and did we wish further proof, it is readily found in the fact that all those communities, great or small, towns, counties, or states, that have tested this, or even much milder doses of similarly-intended laws, have been obliged either to abandon them after a longer or shorter trial, or to acknowledge their impotence to execute them, and to own that under such régime the evils deprecated become more virulent and drunkenness more rampant. Contempt, too, for the law, in one instance, has the inevitable tendency to sap the foundations of respect for all law, not merely in the mind of the drunkard but in that of the moderate drinker, as well as of those who abet them both in their violation of legal enactment. Meanwhile, the sensible man, the practical but unpledged total abstainer, cannot be expected to feel strongly interested in the success of a law which his judgment tells him to be merely an arbitrary enforcement, by a majority, of their views of morality on a minority entitled to their own ideas and practices in this matter alike by natural reason, Scriptural teaching, and church commands. “A nation is near destruction when regard for law has disappeared.”

Fully aware, as we are, that the arguments and deductions, the statements and quotations, contained in this paper are far from being in accord with the oral and printed teachings most in vogue and most palatable to the reading public, and much as we might desire to be on the popular side, still we are not prepared, for the attainment of this end, to sacrifice our convictions of right, to ignore the experience of the past, to turn a deaf ear to the teachings of the church, or to superadd to her commands practices in morals that she knows not. We cannot undertake to find in Scripture injunctions that do not exist; still less are we willing to lie supine when erroneous views are stealthily creeping in (even amongst ourselves), are sedulously promulgated over the length and breadth of the non-Catholic world, and when the attempt is making to enforce even desirable practices in morals and personal discipline by false arguments and means that will not stand the test of right reason. Let us review the ground and gather together the results.

The use of intoxicating liquor or strong drink has been known in all countries and from the earliest times; drunkenness must have been and was equally well known. In no system, even of heathenism, has intoxication been recommended; and in none, save that of Mohammed, has abstinence from liquor been enjoined. The Old and New Testaments, while teeming with allusions to the use of wine and strong drink, nowhere lay down any precept forbidding their use, but frequently by the clearest implication, and in a few instances by express injunction, command the use of both; and the manufacture of wine must, by the institution of our Blessed Saviour, be kept up so long as the world shall exist. There is no proof for the assertion, that alcohol is not food, and less for the averment that it has no efficacy as a remedial agent. The taste for liquor is a natural one and inherent to all men, but probably stronger and more necessary of gratification among hard-working men, and in damp or cold climates, than in the case of sedentary persons or in mild and hot countries. It is not the province of civil government to remove temptation to the infraction of the moral law; its province is to keep order and to punish infractions of law. To pass a series of totally prohibitory laws would be to attempt the legal suppression of human nature; which being impossible, such legislation must be absurd. There are great evils in the present management of the liquor-traffic, chiefly arising from the wholesale adulterations with poisonous drugs everywhere largely practised, but most ruinously in the northern countries of Europe, in Canada, and in the United States. Were the traffic so taken in charge by governments or carefully-appointed companies that pure liquors only should be furnished for consumption, all profits from the sale accruing to government, the great mass of the evils (now justly complained of) in connection with the liquor trade would disappear, while at the same time an immense revenue would accrue to the federal or State treasury, as the case might be. If these prohibitory laws were passed, and carried out in their spirit, dreadful evils would be the result; and, finally, such laws never can be carried out at all, and, by consequence, it is not competent for government to enact them. The whole matter of intemperance comes purely within the domain of morals; religion alone can deal with it radically; and while the civil law should and must punish drunkenness, with the crimes resulting therefrom, it is to Christianity alone that we must look for the effectual reformation of the drunkard and prevention of his sin.

These are the arguments that present themselves to us against the enactment of what are called “prohibitory laws”; and we believe the suggestions above given, regarding the evils of the present liquor trade and the mode of ridding the world of those evils, to be in full consonance both with the facts and with common sense.

“Si quid novisti rectius istis.

Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.”

FRENCH PROVERBIAL SAYINGS.[^[48]]

There is, in the French language, one peculiarity amongst others which only becomes perceptible to foreigners after a somewhat lengthened residence in France—namely, the frequent use of proverbial expressions of which the original meaning, as far as the speaker is concerned, is utterly lost.

For instance, a person grandly dressed out is said to be sur son trente et un; an old piece of furniture or of attire is vieux comme Hérode; again, il ne se foule pas la ratte means “he takes things easily”; prendre les jambes au cou is to go as fast as possible; and a person who speaks French badly is said to parler Français comme une vache Espagnole.

When the English-speaking races use expressions of this kind, there is in them almost always some recognized allusion, quotation, or, it may be, a quaint adaptation of the words of some well-known author, ancient or modern, or they point to some fact or tradition or popular notion. In French familiar conversation, however, there are numberless proverbial and popular sayings still in common use the sense of which has been lost for centuries. Comparatively few amongst those who use them know that they are expressions borrowed, it may be, from certain customs or from history or from literature; but usually the trace is lost, the connection broken, and the reason of their existence forgotten.

These proverbial expressions have, for the most part, been recently collected, and as far as possible accounted for, and their source and history, where not discovered, at least suggested, in an ingenious volume by M. Charles Rozan, in which he gives also certain popular words usually qualified as vulgar, but “whose fundamental meaning it is all the more acceptable to learn, from the fact of their not being yet admitted into the official dictionaries; since,” he adds, “it is intruders more especially whom we would question as to who they are, whence they come, and what they have done.”

In the present notice we have chiefly selected examples having a local, historical, or in some way characteristic interest, and, with one or two exceptions, we have left aside those taken from the drama, besides the numerous sayings, not by any means peculiar to France alone, which relate to classical antiquity, and which any one possessing a very moderate knowledge of ancient history and literature would at once understand.

Je m’en moque comme de l’an quarante is a saying which dates from the beginning of the eleventh century. There was at that period an extensive belief that the end of the world was at hand, and that the thousand years and more supposed to have been assigned by our Lord as the duration of his church on earth, and of society in general, were to expire in the year 40 of that century. Sinners were converted in crowds; many talked of turning hermit; but, once this redoubtable epoch was over, men changed their tone, and from that time to this the expression used in speaking of a thing which need inspire no alarm is: “I care no more for it than for the year forty!”

La beauté du Diable we should naturally suppose meant an appalling ugliness. It means nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, that exceeding prettiness frequently noticeable in young girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, or thereabouts, which then passes away. This, the freshness of youthful beauty, seems to derive its name from the old proverb, The devil was handsome when he was young—namely, while he was yet an unfallen angel.

Ladies somewhat advanced in the debatable ground of life’s pilgrimage, when youth has made way for the nameless years of “a certain age,” are said to coiffer Sainte Catherine.

It was formerly the custom in France, as it still is in Spain and some parts of Italy, on particular festivals, to array in festal garments and headgear the statues of the saints. St. Catherine being the patroness of virgins, the care of her adornment was always entrusted to young girls. This charge, however agreeable and honorable at sixteen, might, nevertheless, not be desirable in perpetuity, and thus it came to be said of any middle-aged maiden: “She stays to coiffer St. Catherine.”

To speak French very badly, or with a bad accent, is called parler Français comme une vache Espagnole. The people inhabiting the Basque provinces obtain their name from the indigenous word vaso—mountain—which, when taken adjectively, is augmented by the final co, and thus becomes vasoco, and, by contraction, vasco—mountaineer. The French, knowing little enough of Spanish, said at first vacco, and then vacce. Thus, parler comme un vacce Espagnol meant at first to allude to the inhabitants of the Basque provinces of Spain, whose language still bears all the characteristics of a primitive tongue, and who have great difficulty in expressing themselves in French; but vacce, at a time when the Latin had left its traces everywhere, was said for vache, the peasants in many of the French provinces retaining it still. Thence arose the confusion which produced the senseless comparison, “to speak French like a Spanish cow.”

Attendez-moi sous l’orme (wait for me under the elm) implies that “the rendezvous you ask is disagreeable to me, and I will not keep it.” The type of an unpleasant rendezvous is that which compels an appearance before the judge, and it is to this that the expression here quoted originally referred. Formerly the judges administered justice under a tree planted in the open space before the church or the entrance of a seignorial mansion; hence the phrase of juges de dessous l’orme, and also that of danser sous l’orme. Attendez-moi sous l’orme means, Find me there if you can (ironically), and to name a rendezvous which one has no intention of keeping.[^[49]]

Faire Charlemagne is to retire from the game after winning it, without giving the adversary a chance of revenge. This expression evidently alludes to the death of the great Charles, who, when he had become the monarch of the West, quitted this life without having lost any of his conquests.

To make unlawful profits by deceiving as to the price of any articles a person has been charged to buy is called “shoeing the mule” (Ferrer la mule). The expression dates from the time when the counsellors of the Parliament repaired to the Palais de Justice mounted on mules, and the lackeys who remained outside during the sittings of the Assembly spent their time in gambling, extorting from their masters the money they wanted for their amusement by pretending that they had had to pay for shoeing the mules. Others carry the origin of the saying back to the time of Vespasian; the muleteer of that emperor, when on a journey, having been bribed to do so, suddenly stopped the mules under pretext of having them shod, so as to give time to a person whom they had met on the way to speak to the emperor of his affairs.

Faire danser l’anse du panier is said of a cook who fraudulently obtains from her mistress more money for her purchases at market than they have really cost. The idea is that of shaking the basket so as to make its contents take up as much room as possible, and thus look worth their alleged price.

Connaître les êtres de la maison is to know the doors, staircases, passages, rooms, outlets, etc.—in a word, the internal arrangements—of the house. Êtres, which for a long time was written aîtres, has for its origin the Latin atria, in the sense of dwelling.

Je l’ai connu poirier is said of a parvenu whose sudden rise from a mean condition has not earned him much consideration. There was in a village near Brussels an image of St. John, black and worm-eaten with age, and held in great veneration by the people. M. le Curé, thinking it time to replace it by a new one, sacrificed his best pear-tree for that purpose. One of his parishioners, who had shown great veneration for the ancient statue, took no notice whatever of the new one. “Have you lost your devotion to St. John?” the curé one day asked him. “No, M. le Curé; but the new St. John is not the real one—I knew him when he was a pear-tree.”

The expression of Cordon Bleu is a singular example of the degradation of an aristocratic word, and we discover its ancestry with the same feeling that we once received the answer of a poor mason’s apprentice, who, on being asked his name, gave as his Christian and surname those of two of the oldest and noblest families in the county of Devon.

To the Order of the Holy Ghost, instituted in 1578 by Henri III., not every one could aspire. It consisted of only one hundred members, at the head of whom, as grand master, was the king.[^[50]] The Dauphin, the sons and grandsons of the monarch, knights by right, were, as well as the princes of the blood, received at the time of their First Communion. Foreign princes were not admitted before the age of twenty-five; dukes and other nobles of high rank not until thirty-five; and in all cases none was allowed to enter who could not trace back at least three generations of nobility on the father’s side. The cord to which the symbol of the order was attached was blue, and the knights themselves were commonly designated Cordons Bleus.

The distinction being reserved to only a small number of persons of the highest rank, it gradually became customary to give the name of cordon bleu to persons of superior merit. The Order of the Holy Ghost was abolished at the Revolution. All the dignities as well as all the ideas which had grouped themselves around this noble order have disappeared with it. Its name is no longer used in the figurative language of France to recall great merit or a distinguished name; the last memory of the order lingers in the kitchen, and the only cordon bleu of the nineteenth century is a good cook!

Those who have hard work and scant pay are wont to observe that they might just as well travailler pour le roi de Prusse. The kingdom of Prussia not having been a century and a half in existence, this expression cannot have an earlier origin. M. Rozan asks, therefore, which is it of the five Fredericks who thus puts in doubt the royal generosity? Some persons say that it is Frederick William I., constantly anxious to show himself economical of the property of his subjects, unlike his father, who was, according to the expression of Frederick the Great, “great in little things and little in great.” Either from what the one did not spend at all, or from what the other spent amiss, a conclusion might be drawn in the sense of the proverb. We incline, however, rather to charge upon the Great Frederick himself all the responsibility of the French reproach.

Frederick II. was fond of employing French workmen, but not quite so fond of paying them; and as no people know better than the French that noblesse oblige, it is no matter of surprise that he should have furnished them with a proverb. We also find an example of his sparing management in the conflict which arose between him and Voltaire (who was very economical also) about lumps of sugar and candle-ends. In the agreement he had made with the poet Frederick had promised him, besides the key of chamberlain and the Cross of Merit, the ordinary appointments of a minister of state—i.e., an apartment at the château, board, firing, two candles a day, and so many pounds of tea, sugar, coffee, and chocolate every month. These articles, though duly provided, were of such bad quality that Voltaire complained to the king. Frederick professed to be infinitely pained, and promised to give fresh orders. Were the orders given? In any case the provisions were as bad as ever, and Voltaire again remonstrated. The king got out of the affair with equal economy and cunning. “It is frightful,” he exclaimed, “to think how badly I am obeyed! I cannot hang those rascals for a lump of sugar or an ounce of tea; they know it, and laugh at my orders. But what most pains me is to see M. de Voltaire disturbed in his sublime ideas by small miseries like these. Ah! let us not waste upon mere trifles the moments that we can devote to friendship and the muses. Come, my dear friend, you can do without these little provisions. They occasion you cares unworthy of you; we will speak of them no more. I will command that for the future they shall be stopped.”

On another occasion Frederick was having a new front put to a Lutheran place of worship in Berlin. The ministers complained to the king that they had not light enough to carry on the service. The building, however, being too far advanced for his majesty to wish to incur the cost of alteration, he sent back their address, after writing upon it: “Blessed are they who see not, and yet believe.”

As a last proof of the just implication of the proverb, an English traveller, who does full justice to the eminent qualities of the monarch, says: “Never was there a fat soldier in any country; but the King of Prussia has not even a fat sergeant. A profound knowledge of financial economy is a point on which this sovereign excels. It is also a reason why his troops should never be otherwise than lean.”

This observer might have added that Frederick made it a rule never to allow his soldiers any pay on the 31st day of the month. There were thus seven days in the year on which the whole Prussian army travaillait pour le roi de Prusse.

Manger de la vache enragée is to suffer great privations, to procure with difficulty the merest necessaries of life, and so to be reduced, as it were, to “eat the flesh of a mad cow.” The expression has also come to mean the trials of every kind which, in the course of life, ought to strengthen the body to endure hardness and the mind to a habit of fortitude.

On entering upon a house or appartement in Paris it is customary to make a present of a few francs to the concierge, which present is called le dernier adieu. The newcomer, if a foreigner, wonders why the first dealings he has with the concierge of his new abode should be so singularly misnamed as “the last farewell.” The words are a corruption of the Denier à Dieu—God’s penny—the piece of money given to the person with whom a bargain was concluded, with the intention of taking God to witness that the engagement had been made, and of offering him a pledge that it should be faithfully kept. The sums thus given were bestowed by the receiver in alms to the poor, and were not appropriated, like the arrhes, a part payment of what was due to the person with whom an agreement had been made.

The lugubrious associations connected with the name of the melancholy building at the back of Notre Dame de Paris encourage the idea that the word morgue must relate to corpses, or in any case to death. M. Rozan disabuses us of the mistake.

There was formerly at the entrance of prisons a room where new arrivals were detained for a few days after committal, in order that the keepers might learn to know their faces and appearance sufficiently well to preclude any chance of their escape. Later on the corpses found in the Seine or elsewhere were exposed in this same room, the public being admitted to see them through a small aperture made in the door.

Until 1804 the corpses were exposed in the lower jail dependent on the prison of the Grand Châtelet, when they were transferred to the quay of the Marché Neuf in a small building which received the name of morgue, an old French word for face or visage, and used also to express a fixed or scrutinizing look. It is doubtless in the latter sense that we find the true meaning of the term.

Now that we have given a greatly abridged version of portions of M. Rozan’s work, we refer the reader for the remaining curious fragments of information scattered throughout its pages to the book itself. At the same time we venture a suggestion that in future editions it might be well if the author were, as far as practicable, to classify its contents under certain heads—such, for instance, as are dramatic, historic, local, or classic, etc., in their origin or allusion—so as to allow some continuity of ideas in its perusal, and to gather its at present scattered stones into a collection of mosaics.

THE HOME-RULE CANDIDATE.
A STORY OF “NEW IRELAND.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE ELECTION.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE CHAPEL AT MONAMULLIN,” “THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU,” ETC., ETC.

I was received at Clonacooney with an enthusiasm that sent the hot blood surging through my veins in prideful throbs. At the entrance to the village I was presented with an address by a splendid specimen of the Irish race in the person of Myles Moriarty, a man who had been “out” in forty-eight, who, on the part of the tenant-farmers of Clonacooney, tendered me welcome and assurances of both moral and physical support.

“The dark hour is passin’ from the ould country, sir, and yours be the hand to wipe the tear from the cheek of Erin,” were his concluding words.

I must have spoken to the point, for I was cheered to the echo, and my right hand almost wrung from the arm by repeated shakings.

In Father O’Dowd’s garden a small platform had been raised, composed of the kitchen table, the safety of which Biddy Finnegan watched over with tender regard.

Around the little grass-plat some hundred of the “boys” were gathered, who bared their heads in respectful reverence when the good priest ascended the dais.

It is chiefly in Ireland that one sees the visible link that binds priests and people. The Irish peasant never forgets that he is in the presence of the Lord’s anointed, and the respect for the clergyman upon the hillside or wayside is the same as though he were clad in his vestments and upon the altar.

Father O’Dowd introduced me in a speech that burned into the minds of his auditory. It was full of fiery eloquence, full of patriotism, full of Catholicity. In dealing with the question of Home Rule he said: “Over a country agitated by dissension and weakened by mistrust we have raised the banner of Home Rule. We raised it hesitatingly, unfurling it tremblingly to the breeze; but the hearts of the people have been moved by the two small words, and the soul of the nation has felt their power and their spell. These words have passed from man to man along the valley and along the hillside. Everywhere our despairing sons have turned to that banner with confidence and hope. Thus far we have borne it. Upon these young and stalwart shoulders,” placing his arm affectionately around me, “we shall now place it, to be borne unto victory. It is meet that the representative of a stainless race, of a race that upheld their creed when its avowal led to the scaffold and gibbet, should go forth from among us young in years, high in hope, ardent in the cause of creed and country. We shall hand our banner into his youthful hands, and with him this trust shall be considered sacred. He will defend it, if necessary, with his life. The cause of the church will be his; the cause of the country will be his.”

When it came to my turn to speak a mist seemed to gather before my eyes and my head began to swim.

“Courage!” whispered Father O’Dowd. “Nos hæc novimus esse nihil.”

I plunged in medias res, floundering on, stumbling, staggering, repeating myself, till I felt all aflame, and as if my head were red-hot. Suddenly the idea smote me that I had Wynwood Melton to beat, and I became cool as ice. Yes, the transition was simply instantaneous, and with it came a flow of words such as have never welled from me since, save, perhaps, upon the day of the election.

I spoke for nearly an hour, and I subsequently recollected that I had discussed the entire political situation of Ireland, as I had done some years before in a debate at the Catholic University. Memory came gallantly to the rescue, and when I concluded Father O’Dowd cried enthusiastically:

“A born orator—nascitur, non fit. Now, boys,” addressing the tumultuous assemblage, “haven’t we got the right man, and won’t we put him in the right place?”

When I returned to Kilkenley I found that Mr. Melton had taken his departure.

“He is alive to the importance of an active canvass,” said Mr. Hawthorne, “and has repaired to the tents of his people. I am very sorry that the warning should come from me—a warning that may be of singular disservice to you.”

“I feel that I shall win.”

“My dear young friend, I felt that I would win, and discredited the returns that threw me overboard when I contested Fromsey. Do not let your feelings mislead you. Work as if expecting defeat, and as if endeavoring to reduce the majority against you. I’m an old campaigner and know the ropes.”

My mother was all eagerness to know how I had progressed. When I told her that I had made two speeches, one of them of an hour’s duration, her delight was boundless.

“You were lost, dear child,” she cried. “Your talents are of a high order, and you have at last found a field for them.”

Harry Welstone had attended a meeting at Ballynashaughragawn, and had held forth in my behalf, like a regular brick that he was. All my jealousy disappeared upon the mention of Melton, and Harry was again my confidant in everything.

“I don’t think she cares much for that fellow, Fred.”

“I tell you that they understand each other.” And I writhed in the agony of the thought.

“I think her governor is nibbling for Melton as a son-in-law, but there is no ring of the true metal about the girl’s feelings—nothing that I can detect; and I’m not utterly unobservant.”

I never felt that the gash in my heart was so deep until Miss Hawthorne referred to their leaving.

“Our time is up. We have overstayed our limit.”

“Surely you will not desert us until after the election,” said my mother. “You must celebrate his success, if success it is to be.”

“Oh! Miss Hawthorne is not interested in my success, mother,” I interposed.

She turned her violet eyes full upon me.

“Much more so than you give me credit for.”

“My non-success, you mean.”

“I do not mean it.”

“It is quite right that you should,” I said bitterly. “I have no claim upon your interest.”

“A very strong one, I assure you.”

“Melton’s the man,” assuming a savage gayety. “How jolly he will feel if he wins! how delighted to bear the news to his lady-love!”

“Does it not strike you, Mr. Ormonde, that your last observation is upon the borderland of—what shall I call it?”

“Truth,” I suggested.

She did not deign to reply to me, but, turning to my mother, expressed a fear that she should leave Kilkenley upon the following day.

“I will not hear of it,” said my mother stoutly.

There was one chance left, and that lay in inducing Mr. Hawthorne to stump the county with me. This scheme I confided to Harry, who highly approved of it. After dinner, when the ladies had returned to the drawing-room, Harry opened fire.

“Mr. Hawthorne, the people about here are exceedingly anxious to hear you speak. They have heard a good deal of your eloquence in Parliament, and have read some of your speeches.”

“I am not reported, sir. Those scoundrels in the press gallery ignore me because I defy them. Would you believe it, gentlemen, my speech upon the removal of a custom-house officer upon a charge of disloyalty to the throne and constitution, and which occupied two hours and a half in its delivery—I went into the question of customs generally, into those of foreign countries, into the national debt, into our relations with Japan, into the contracts for constructing ironclads—in fact, I grasped a series of subjects of the highest importance to the country; and would you believe it, Mr. Speaker—I mean gentlemen—the Times, although I saw that the reporter—yes, gentlemen, I watched him with an eagle eye—was present and apparently engaged in reporting me—the Times, I say, had the audacity to publish that the honorable member for Doodleshire uttered some irrelevant observations which were inaudible in the reporters’ gallery; and yet this unprincipled scoundrel pockets his pay, and reports the flimsy orations of other honorable members not one tithe of so much national importance as mine.” And trembling with anger, Mr. Hawthorne gulped down three glasses of claret in rapid succession.

“The Irish people,” continued Harry, “are the most rhetorical and oratorical in the world, and prefer a good speech to any known amusement except a wake. News of your presence here has gone far and wide, and I may tell you fairly that it is incumbent upon you to let them hear you.”

“I—ahem!—would be very pleased to do so, did a suitable opportunity present itself,” said the M.P. with a pleased smile.

“The opportunity luckily does present itself. On Thursday next our host here must attend a meeting of his constituents at Bohernacallan, and, if you were to accompany him and address the people, I assure you it will be regarded as a very considerable favor by the hundreds who will be assembled.”

“On Thursday next I shall be on my way to London.”

“Not a bit of it,” I chimed in.

“There is nothing to be done in London now, Mr. Hawthorne,” said Harry.

“My arrangements are all made, and nothing, sir, nothing could induce me to break them. I am a man of iron, adamant in such matters.”

I looked blankly at Harry, but Master Harry was still hopeful, as indicated by a dexterous half-wink while the M.P. was tossing off another glass of claret.

“I may tell you as a matter of fact, Mr. Hawthorne, that you are expected at this meeting.”

“It is very flattering, Mr. Welstone, but the meeting must stand disappointed in so far as I am concerned. No, gentlemen; in the House or outside of it, once I lay down a plan of operations, I never diverge from it by the distance of a single hair.”

Again I looked blankly at Harry, and again I met with a half-wink.

“That’s very unfortunate, Mr. Hawthorne, but I suppose it cannot be helped.”

“It cannot indeed, sir.”

“And reporters coming down from Dublin, too,” said Harry, addressing me.

“What is that you say, Mr. Welstone?” demanded the member of Doodleshire with considerable earnestness.

“Oh! it’s not worth repeating.”

“I think I heard you mention something about reporters?”

“Oh! yes; the Dublin newspapers are sending down special reporters, and the London Times’ correspondent is a reporter on the Daily Express.”

“Ahem!” And Mr. Hawthorne gravely produced a memorandum-book, which he proceeded to scan with apparent interest.

Harry gave me the full wink now.

“Oh dear me—ahem!” exclaimed the M.P. “I find that I need not be in London quite so soon, and if it obliges you, my dear Ormonde, I shall be glad to strike a blow in your aid. Did you say the Times’ correspondent will be there? Not that it makes the slightest difference to me; yet, belonging as I do to the great liberal party, and belonging as this election does to the great liberal party, I deem it a sacred duty to aid the great liberal party in so far as it lies in my power. Mr. Ormonde, rely upon me, sir.”

When later on I spoke with Harry on the question of deceiving my guest, especially as no reporters would be within fifty miles of us, “Don’t bother your head about it, Fred. Leave it all to me. I’ll get Tom Rafferty and the two O’Briens to come with big pencils and lots of paper, and tell them to write for their lives the whole time old Hawthorne is speaking. Everything is fair in love, war, and an election.”

---

The excitement in the county was intense as soon as the fact of my being in the field became known across its length and breadth. The De Ruthvens were furious, the head of the family, Mr. Beresford de Ruthven, honoring me with a personal visit, in order to ascertain whether I was in my senses or out of them.

“Am I to understand, Mr. Ormonde, that you are a candidate for the representation of this county?” he asked, after the usual ceremonial questions had been pushed aside.

“You are, Mr. De Ruthven.”

“That you have consented to be nominated by a rabble—to be—”

“I have been nominated by no rabble, Mr. De Ruthven.”

“You are the nominee of the priests.”

“I am, sir; but have a care how you speak of a Catholic clergyman in this house. You are not now at Ruthventown.” I was hot with anger.

“Do you want to break up the harmony that has existed for centuries in the county, Mr. Ormonde?”

“I want to see a liberal represent the county, and I am willing to give way to a better man.”

“Liberal! What liberality do you require? Do not the liberals have their share in everything?”

I had him now.

“How many liberals are there on the grand panel, Mr. De Ruthven?”

“Oh! I grant you that there has been mismanagement,” he hastily replied, “but we’ll see to that.”

“What liberality is it that leaves the roads approaching every Catholic church in a condition that would shame a backwoods clearing, while those near the meanest Protestant place of worship are cared for like the avenues in your own domain?”

“That shall be looked to.”

“Where is the liberality at the union boards, in the magistracy, in the county offices? Is there a single Catholic in any office whatever?”

“O Mr. Ormonde! I see you are primed and loaded, and must go off like a fifth-of-November cracker. Now, all I can say to you is this: that if you persist in this audacious attempt in breaking up the harmony of this great county, on your own head be the penalty; and let me add, sir, that when next you attend the assizes, do not be surprised if you are openly insulted.”

“And do not be surprised, Mr. De Ruthven, if the man who dares insult me is openly horse-whipped.”

Mr. De Ruthven, very much disgusted at my papistical audacity, took his leave, warning me, even when in his carriage, that I was certain of defeat, and equally certain of being put in Coventry.

My attempt to wrest the seat from the conservative party was regarded with the same interest as Mr. A. M. Sullivan’s daring effort to snatch Louth from the Right Honorable Chichester Fortescue—an effort that was crowned with such signal success. The cabinet minister and ex-Irish secretary, who was regarded as Mr. Gladstone’s official representative in Ireland, was deemed invulnerable in Louth, having sat for it for twenty-seven years. The government laughed to scorn the idea of disturbing him, but Mr. Sullivan polled two to one, and was carried in by such a weighty majority as virtually to close the county for ever and a day, as the children’s story-books say.

In my county the conservatives laughed my attempt to scorn, pooh-poohing my pretensions and ridiculing my supporters. My opponent made Ruthventown his headquarters, and from Ruthventown came forth his address. From Ruthventown also was issued a manifesto, or imperial ukase rather, commanding the tenants to vote for the De Ruthven candidate, while from every conservative landlord appeared a notice couched in similar dictatorial terms. To these counter-proclamations were scattered broadcast by my various committees throughout the country, calling upon Catholics to support a Catholic, upon Irishmen to support Home Rule.

Father O’Dowd was indefatigable, leaving Sir Boyle Roche’s bird simply nowhere, as he would appear to be in half a dozen different places at one and the same time. He lived upon his little outside-car, and the dead hours of the night saw him dashing through lonely glens, winding up steep mountain-sides, speeding through sleeping villages, all for the purpose of bringing the old faith to the front, and of rescuing representation from the clutches of the Orange clique, who had held it so long, to the prejudice of Catholicity and the shame of Catholics.

“We’ll shake off the yoke now or never!” was his constant cry. “Down with the De Ruthven ascendency! We’ll take their heels off our necks. We have suffered and endured too long and too patiently. We have allowed a little clique to govern a nation at their own sweet will. It is time for the people to assert themselves, to come to the front, to share in their own government. The hour is at hand, and the men.”

The county was ablaze. Meetings were held in every village, and my name was handed from townland to townland as a talisman. The most despicable coercive measures were adopted by the conservative landlords toward their tenants with reference to their votes, threats of eviction, of rent-raising, of persecution being openly resorted to.

“Make no promises, boys. Keep yourselves unpledged,” was the constant cry of Father O’Dowd. “Recollect that you have consciences and a country.”

At one meeting, whilst I was engaged in speaking—even now I feel astonished at my eloquence of that time—I was interrupted by some of the De Ruthven faction, who endeavored to hiss and hoot me down.

“Boys,” yelled a voice in the crowd, “there’s iligant bathing in Missis Moriarty’s pond below; they say it’s Boyne wather.” And ere I could interpose or take any step towards cooling the feverish excitement of my supporters, the luckless Ruthvenites were ruthlessly swept towards the dam in question, where in all human probability they would have been half-drowned had not Father O’Dowd rushed to the rescue.

“Are you mad, boys? Don’t touch a hair of their heads.”

“We want for to larn them manners, yer riverince; shure there’s no great harm in that.”

“If one of these vagabonds is ill-treated by you, they’ll unseat Mr. Ormonde on petition. You will not suffer, but Mr. Ormonde will. For Heaven’s sake, boys, don’t lay a finger on them.”

The announcement caused a general gloom.

“Never mind, boys,” shouted one of the crowd. “Shure if we can’t bate thim afore the election, we can knock sawdust out av thim whin it’s all over, an’ that’s a comfort anyhow.”

From every side promises of support came pouring in. The priests and people were working as one man, silently, swiftly, surely. The “hard word” had gone forth, and every parish was preparing its contingent. The hints and cajoleries of the other side were received in dignified silence—a silence which the ascendency party construed into assent. It was deemed utterly impossible that the tenantry could vote against the nominee of their landlords; and although these “slave-owners” received very significant warnings from their bailiffs, they could not and would not give heed to them.

My address was drawn up in a solemn committee composed of Father O’Dowd, Mr. Hawthorne, Mabel, my mother, and myself. I need not reproduce it here. It was Catholic and national, and when it went forth to the county it was received with universal enthusiasm. The opposite party stigmatized it as an “audacious document,” a “firebrand.” “Yes,” said the parish priest of Derrymaleena, “it is a firebrand, and one that lights the funeral pyre of the Orange party.”

I found Miss Hawthorne rewriting a copy of my address.

“I will save you the trouble, Miss Hawthorne,” I said bitterly, and Heaven knows my heart was at a dead ache, “and I will send a copy to Mr. Melton.”

She flushed, the hot blood mounting over her little ears. “You do me a cruel injustice, Mr. Ormonde,” she replied. “Read that!” contemptuously flinging me an open letter across the table.

“I do not wish to pry into Mr. Melton’s secrets.”

“That letter is not from Mr. Melton. I never received one from him in my life, nor do I care to receive one; but since you will not read this letter, you shall hear its contents.”

She read as follows in a pained voice:

My Dear Mrs. Ormonde:

As the coming man is so busy, and is probably at the other side of the county, I write to you to ask you to send me a copy of his address as soon as ever you can. We are all alive here, and Victory is within our grasp. Always yours,

Peter Heffernan.

“Now, Mr. Ormonde, may I ask you if it was generous of you to—”

“Forgive me, Miss Hawthorne,” I exclaimed. “I—I do not know what I am doing, what I am saying. I am distracted—wretched.” I was silent. I dared go no further. The vision of Wynwood Melton cried check to the bounding thoughts that came surging from my heart.

“The evening of the 20th will find you in better form.”

I shook my head. The future was utterly dreary—one blank, sunless waste.

“You will win this election, Mr. Ormonde.”

I sighed deeply.

“A barren victory.”

“A barren victory!” she exclaimed with considerable animation. “Do you consider it a barren victory to beat the Carlton Club, the great conservative stronghold of England, whose every ukase is law—to beat the De Ruthven faction, who have held your beautiful county in subjection since the Pale?”

“A Dead-Sea apple. In winning this election I win your hatred.”

“My hatred?” opening her lovely violet eyes in delicious wonder.

“Yes, Miss Hawthorne; if I am elected I shall have beaten the man you love.”

She flushed again—a shower of rose-petals.

“There is not a more miserable being on the face of this earth than I am this moment, Miss Hawthorne. Were I not pledged in honor to this election, I would stand aside and let Mr. Melton win this stake, as he has won the higher stake—your heart.”

She was about to interrupt me, her lips tremulous, her hands in strong action.

“Hear me for one moment,” I cried, carried away in a rush of tumultuous feeling, every sense in a mad whirl. “I love you, Mabel—love you with a love that is more than love. I tried to hate you. In that vain attempt I resolved to bring sorrow to your heart, to glut my own desire for vengeance. It was jealous despair that led me into this conflict. It is possible I may not see you until the fight is over, perhaps never again; but, Mabel Hawthorne, my first, my last love, it may be sweet to you to know why this victory will be a barren one, why the hand that grasps the laurel will seize but dead ashes.” And without trusting myself even to glance at her, I rushed from the room, from the house, and was many miles on the road to Derrymaclury ere thoroughly aware of the fact.

---

I did not return to Kilkenley. I dreaded the fearful fascination of Mabel’s presence, and, now that I had declared my hopeless love, I did not care to meet her. It would be mean and shabby to hang about her, knowing she was never to be mine. It would be despicable, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, were I again to refer to Melton or the election. There was nothing for it but to remain at a distance. I recall the agonies of those few days with a shiver. The powerful excitement of the approaching contest was over-weighted by the dull gnawing at my heart. I was as one walking in a painful dream. In vain I plunged into the whirl of speech-making, canvassing, and all the absorbing surroundings of the election—truly in vain, for the one idea ever grimly tortured me, and the one hopeless thought ever perched raven-like in my gloom-laden mind.

“Take heart of grace, man,” Father O’Dowd would say. “We’ll beat them three to one.”

Could he minister to the disease that was eating away my very heart?

Harry Welstone came over.

“Why, there has been a sort of panic at Kilkenley on account of your abrupt departure, Fred. The last person who saw you in the flesh was Miss Hawthorne, and she is very reticent in the matter. I tried to pump her, and got quietly sat upon for my pains. She has disappeared, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has been playing the invisible princess. Your opponent called twice, and she refused to see him.”

“Is it Melton?” I cried, a wild joy surging around my heart.

“Yes; the great M.P. in embryo.”

“Wouldn’t see him?”

“Said she had a headache.”

“You jest, Harry.”

“Not a bit of it. Old Blunderbuss was as mad as a hatter, but missy stuck fast to her colors.”

“I wish to heaven you hadn’t told me this, Harry.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

And I did not know, but so it was. There lay a disturbing element in this news that completely set me astray. Hope, that springs eternal in the human breast; hope, that seemed shut out from mine for ever, was timidly knocking at the portals demanding admittance; but I resolutely barred the portals, raising the drawbridge, and dropping the portcullis. And yet—

No. I would not admit the impossible.

The nomination took place in the court-house at Ballyraken, the county town, which was literally packed with the country people, who had come in from the great harvest districts to hear the “speechifyin’.” The De Ruthven faction mustered very strongly, all the Protestant gentry arriving in their equipages, making “a brave and goodly show.” Mr. Wynwood Melton—who appeared in a faultlessly-fitting black frock-coat, with the last rose of summer in his button-hole, a hat that literally shone like jet, and pale lavender gloves—was proposed by Sir Robert Slugby de Ruthven, D.L., and seconded by Mr. Beresford de Ruthven, D.L.

Sir Robert, an aged, aristocratic-looking man, with a lordly voice and royal mien, after dilating, amidst fearful interruption, upon the misfortune that had fallen on the county in the ill-considered enterprise of this rash young man—meaning me—in his hopeless endeavor to disturb the harmony which had so long existed in the county, proceeded to say:

“I have a gentleman to propose to your consideration—a gentleman of birth, a gentleman of education, a gentleman of position, a gentleman of means, a gentleman—”

Here a voice, which I immediately recognized as that of Peter O’Brien, cried out in the crowd:

“Arrah, blur an’ ages, we’re tired av gintlemin; can’t ye stand yerself?”

This sally, which was greeted with a roar of laughter, completely upset the little speech which Sir Robert had prepared, and in a few mumbled words he proposed Mr. Wynwood Melton as a fit and proper person to represent the county in the Imperial Parliament.

Mr. Beresford de Ruthven was an able and popular speaker. He knew how, when, and where to touch the heart of the Irish peasant. His tact was admirable, while he possessed the rare qualification of being enabled to keep his audience in his hands as a juggler his golden balls.

We feared his speech. It was a rock ahead, and every word that fell from his lips was to be caught up and treasured, in order that our best men should reply to him. We knew it was nearly impossible to catch him tripping, and that he was one of those agile performers who spring smilingly to their feet even after an ugly fall.

“I wish this was over,” whispered Father O’Dowd. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. He’ll butter the boys like parsnips, and promise them the moon.”

Mr. De Ruthven commenced his speech in a breathless silence. Oratory is always respected in Ireland, even in an opponent, although that opponent be a Protestant and an Orangeman. The speaker labored under the disadvantage of possessing but one hand, the other having been accidentally shot off by the bursting of a fowling-piece while Mr. De Ruthven was grouse-shooting in Scotland.

His speech was, unhappily for us, most felicitous. He seemed to suit himself to the occasion, and to make the occasion suit him. A faint murmur followed one or two of his well-directed points, which gradually swelled into open applause, until, to our dismay, we found he was carrying the audience with him.

Our party gazed significantly one at the other. We all perceived that the danger we had already anticipated was upon us in real earnest. At this moment I perceived Peter O’Brien elbowing himself to the front. A dead silence had fallen, one of those unaccountable stillnesses that occasionally come upon all assemblages, however large. Mr. De Ruthven was about to recommence, when Peter, putting his hands to his mouth, and in a voice that could be heard in the adjacent barony, shouted at the top of his lungs:

“Where’s the hand that sthruck the priest?”

To describe the effect of this query would be impossible. It was simply electrical. In one second the current, which had been flowing smoothly, became dammed, and instantly turned into another channel. In vain did Mr. De Ruthven endeavor to gain a hearing; in vain to disclaim the odious charge that had been indirectly preferred against him. It was useless. Every effort was met by a thousand cries of “Where’s the hand that sthruck the priest?” And in these few words the sun of his eloquence had set for ever. The high-sheriff almost burst a blood-vessel in his endeavor to obtain silence, until, finding the task a hopeless one, he advised Mr. De Ruthven to formally second the nomination and retire, which was accordingly done, and in dumb show.

When Melton presented himself he was received with laughter and jeers. The people had just warmed into that facetious good-humor that is so dangerous to a candidate for their suffrages. Opposition makes a martyr. Laughter causes a man to appear ridiculous.

“What’ll ye take for the posy?”

“Off wud yer gloves.”

“Will ye give us a pup out o’ that hat?”

“Is that coat ped for?”

“The raison it’s so new is that he wants to be able for to turn it, boys.”

“Spake up.”

“Give us a little Irish.”

“Sing the ‘Wearin’ av the Green.’”

“We’ll return ye—to England.”

“Go home to yer mother.”

“Cud ye say boo to a goose?”

“Och! we’ll vote for ye all together like Brown’s cows, an’ he had only wan.”

“Yer a fine man to send—out o’ the counthry.”

“Arrah, what brought ye here at all?”

“Ax for the price o’ the thrain for to take ye home, an’ mebbe ould Beresford wud give it to ye.”

Such were the greetings that interrupted Mr. Wynwood Melton during the delivery of a very brief speech, not one word of which even reached the reporters’ table. He seemed, however, perfectly unruffled, and continued bowing for a considerable time in response to the derisive cheering that followed upon his silence.

Father O’Dowd was received with a whirlwind of cheers, yells, and other manifestations of enthusiastic delight.

In proposing me he was very brief, alluding to the degrading position held by Catholics in a county where the large majority of the people were Catholics, and where everything that could be denied a Catholic was denied him. He was good enough to refer to the intrepidity with which my poor father had upheld the ancient faith, to his true-hearted patriotism, and wound up by declaring that this was the hour for the county to assert itself, both for conscience and country.

I read my speech in the Weekly Courier on the following Saturday, and I suppose I must have uttered it, but I have not the remotest conception of what I said. It read wonderfully well; and as Father O’Dowd told me I surpassed myself, I felt more or less elated at my success.

“If she had been there to hear it!” was my sad, sickening thought.

Læta dies aderat. The eventful day arrived big with my fate and that of the county. I felt that I was but the mere instrument, and, if victory were to crown the effort, it would be due to the principle and not the man. We knew that in some districts we would be badly beaten, while in others the issue was somewhat doubtful; but as to the ultimate outcome we entertained not a shadow of a doubt. The people were panting for a chance, and they had got it now.

When I showed the voting-papers to Peter, telling him that a cross marked in pencil should go opposite the name of the candidate for whom the voter wished to vote, he anxiously demanded:

“An’ must the min that votes for the Englishman put in a crass, too?”

“Every man of them.”

“Och, thin, glory be to God! shure it’s a judgmint on thim Protestants for to have to make the sign av the blessed an’ holy crass at all, at all—curse of Crummle on thim!”

Fearing a disturbance, as party spirit ran so high and as my supporters were so excited, a strong detachment of the Sixtieth Rifles was marched into Ballyraken on the eve of the polling. The Protestant landlords had secured free quarters in the town for such of their tenantry as chose to inhabit them, while they themselves occupied the Club House and De Ruthven Arms in a most imposing and demonstrative manner.

I was walking down the main street, all alone, thinking not of the forthcoming ballot, but of Mabel, when I perceived my opponent lounging on the steps of the Club House. I should be compelled to pass the Club House or cross the street, and as I was a member of the club, although I never frequented it, I now resolved upon boldly entering the enemy’s camp.

I was passing Melton with a nod when he stepped forward and in a singularly insolent tone demanded a word with me. He was very white.

“I was at Kilkenley yesterday.”

“Indeed!” I said. His tone was too uncertain to admit of my making any comment upon his visit.

“I suppose Miss Hawthorne is acting under your orders?” he hissed.

“I am at a loss to understand your meaning, sir,” I hotly replied.

“Not at home save to those whom you may be pleased to admit to your palatial residence,” he sneered.

“My residence is a very humble one, Mr. Melton, and when you honored it with your person I hope you found it a hospitable one. Miss Hawthorne is mistress of her own movements, but let me tell you, sir, that she is my mother’s guest, and the guest of an Ormonde is sacred.”

“Very dramatic, but scarcely to the point.”

“I’ll come to any point you please.”

“When this election business is over I may have something to say to you,” his tone fairly exasperating.

I could stand it no longer.

“You white-livered cub, whatever you have to say, say it now!” I shouted, the blood rushing like molten lava through my veins.

“I don’t row in public.”

“Do you wish me to tell you what I think of you, in public, Mr. Melton?”

He smiled.

“Pah! you are not worth this stick, or I’d break it across your shoulders.” And I marched into the club, my heart bumping against my ribs from sheer excitement.

What could he mean? Miss Hawthorne refuse to see him at my request? It was too absurd. Some lover’s quarrel. Was this cad her lover? Had her heart gone forth to such a man as this?

It was torture to think it.

Contrary to all expectations, the conduct of the people was orderly and peaceable. The dread of a petition had been seared into their very souls by Father O’Dowd and by the admirable organization that had charge of my interests. They came up to the booths silent, almost sullen. The landlords and bailiffs were all at their posts, uttering a last warning word as the tenants filed into the booths, addressing them cheerily as they emerged therefrom, in the hope of gleaning the much-coveted information as to the direction of the vote; but the responsibility of that day’s work appeared upon every face, and they entered the voting-places as though stepping into a church. Telegrams came pouring in all day from the outlying districts.

“Ballymaclish is all right—a majority of sixty; Derrymaclooney accounts for every man,” cried Father O’Dowd. “Bravo, my dear old parish! I knew I could trust my good, brave, pious children.”

Later on: “The De Ruthvens have carried Tubbercurry.”

“That’s because Father Nolan is on the broad of his back.”

“Ay, and because the Beresfords have stopped at nothing,” observed one of my committee. “If we want a petition we can pick it up in Tubbercurry. A telegram this morning says that there were money and whiskey going all the week.”

“How about Dharnadhulagh?”

“No returns yet.”

“Or Derrycunnihy?”

“Derrycunnihy is doubtful.”

“Not a bit of it.”

“I say it is.”

“I say it isn’t. Sure, Father James O’Neil has it in hands.”

“Oh! that will do. Put us down at forty at the very least.”

This sort of thing went on all day; but as the day wore on and the returns came in, we found at four o’clock that I had a majority, and at five that I had beaten Melton like a hack.

A wild flash of joy quivered through me. Frederic Fitzgerald Ormonde, M.P.! Visions of St. Stephen’s, of fierce debates over the crushing wrongs of expectant Erin, of glorious oratory, of splendid, supreme efforts, of magnificent rewards, honors—Cui bono?

She would hate me for having beaten her lover in the race. But was he her lover? Had not her tell-tale blushes told me all? And yet I had given her no chance of reply. Perhaps—

As this idea smote me a nameless ecstasy vibrated through every fibre of my being, and I longed to get to Kilkenley, I knew not why.

It was excruciating to be compelled to wait and receive the congratulations of my friends and supporters. It was simply fearful to have to sit out a dinner which had been prepared in my honor, and to listen to the leaden speeches all harping upon the one theme.

Somehow or other the night passed onwards, and at about eleven o’clock I found myself free. I rode over to Kilkenley; it was a mad race, and how I contrived to avoid riding down some of my constituents is still a matter of mystery to me. It relieved my feverish spirits to give the reins to my horse, and we flew homewards, past villages, past homesteads, past inebriated revellers on low-backed cars, past bonfires which were lighted for miles along the route, past hedges, ditches—everything; nor did I draw rein until I drew up at the lodge, shouting the word “Gate!”

“Lord be merciful to us! but it’s the masther,” cried Mrs. O’Rourke, the lodge-keeper, as she tremblingly threw open the gate. “May I make so bould as to ax ye if ye bet the Englishman, sir?”

“Beat him to smithereens.”

“Glory be to God! I knew Father O’Dowd would settle it.”

There were lights all through the house. The great event had kept the household out of their beds. My mother fell upon my neck in a paroxysm of joy when I told her the news.

“Where is Mabel—I mean Miss Hawthorne, mother?” I stammered.

“She was here a moment ago. Is Mr. Hawthorne at Ballyraken?”

“Yes; I left him making a third speech.”

“You must be worn out, my child. I’ll make you some mulled port.”

Something told me that I should find Mabel in the adjoining room; and my instincts had not deceived me. She stood in the centre of the apartment, one hand resting upon a small table. When I found myself standing opposite to her I felt utterly, totally dumbfounded. I could only stare at her.

“I heard the news,” she said, casting down her violet eyes. Ah! that was all she had to say.

“Will you forgive me?” I cried.

“Mr. Ormonde,” her hands working nervously, her glorious eyes still bent upon the table, her exquisitely-shaped head half averted, “I—I—that is—you have been under a most extraordinary misconception with reference to Mr. Melton. That gentleman is only a friend. As a matter of fact, I—I was so—so distressed at your ideas about him in connection with myself”—here she blushed red as a rose—“that I refused to see him when he came to visit here yesterday.”

“Then you are not in love with him?”

She raised her violet eyes, and her glance met mine as she uttered the, to me, ecstatic word, “No.”

“And not engaged to him?”

“No.”

I do not know what I said or what I did; but this I do know: that when my mother entered the room with a tumbler of mulled port, she dropped the tumbler, uttering an exclamation of delight, and fell to kissing Mabel, exclaiming: “This is the one thing wanted to make me perfectly happy. My poor boy was breaking his heart about you.”

---

I was declared duly elected to serve the county in the United Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland.

Mr. Hawthorne duly presented me to Mr. Speaker upon the occasion of my taking the oaths and my seat. My first nap in the House was during a speech from the member for Doodleshire, which was not treating the ethereal thunder of his mind with becoming respect, especially as he had just been good enough to give me his daughter in marriage. We were married at the pro-cathedral at Kensington, by Father O’Dowd.

Melton I never met.

Harry Welstone and I are closer friends than ever, as he is in the House, representing the borough of Bohernabury, and we are always “agin the government.”

We reside at Kilkenley, and Peter O’Brien is teaching my eldest boy to handle the ribbons.

“Musha, thin, whin I rowled out forninst ye in the dirt beyant at the railway station, it’s little I ever thought I’d see ye misthress av the ould anshint property, ma’am,” is his constant remark to the lady of the manor, while he is perpetually urging upon me the crying necessity for “takin’ a heat out av Drizzlyeye.”

“Bloody wars, Masther Fred, but you an’ ould Butt is too aisy wud him. Give him plinty av impudince, an’ as shure’s me name’s Pether O’Brien ye’ll have Home Rule while ye’d be axin’ the lind av a sack.”

THE END.