"Then we'll shoot them like dogs, as the French did! 'Mort aux voleurs' shall be the word!"
"Unless they shoot us. The French had a national guard, who had property to lose, and took care of it. The shopkeepers here will be all against us; they'll all be sworn in special constables, to a man; and between them and the soldiers, we shall have three to one upon us."
"Oh! that Power assures me the soldiers will fraternize. He says there are three regiments at least have promised solemnly to shoot their officers, and give up their arms to the mob."
"Very important, if true—and very scoundrelly, too, I'd sooner be shot myself by fair fighting, than see officers shot by cowardly treason."
"Well, it's ugly. I like fair play as well as any man. But it can't be done. There must be a surprise, a coup de main, as the French say" (poor Crossthwaite was always quoting French in those days). "Once show our strength—burst upon the tyrants like a thunderclap; and then!—
"Men of England, heirs of glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Rise, shake off the chains like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you!
Ye are many, they are few!"
"That's just what I am afraid they are not. Let's go and find out this man
Power, and hear his authority for the soldier-story. Who knows him?"
"Why, Mike Kelly and he had been a deal together of late, Kelly's a true heart now—a true Irishman ready for anything. Those Irish are the boys, after all—though I don't deny they do bluster and have their way a little too much in the Convention. But still Ireland's wrongs are England's. We have the same oppressors. We must make common cause against the tyrants."
"I wish to Heaven they would just have stayed at home, and ranted on the other side of the water; they had their own way there, and no Mammonite middle-class to keep them down; and yet they never did an atom of good. Their eloquence is all bombast, and what's more, Crossthwaite, though there are some fine fellows among them, nine-tenths are liars—liars in grain, and you know it—"
Crossthwaite turned angrily to me. "Why, you are getting as reactionary as old Mackaye himself!"