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.
A SECTARIAN DIPLOMATIC SERVICE.
Our federal government, as a government, is absolutely forbidden by the Constitution to have anything whatever to do with religion; but the State Department has been for years and is now conducted as if it were an agency for a religious sectarian propaganda. The gentlemen whom it has sent to represent us at foreign courts have acted, in numberless instances and with few exceptions, as if they were the emissaries of Protestant or infidel missionary societies rather than as the ambassadors, ministers, and chargés d’affaires of a government which professes no religion, but which nevertheless has among its citizens eight millions of Roman Catholics, more or less, whose rights and opinions it is bound at least to respect. Many of these gentlemen have seemed to believe that one of their principal duties, especially if accredited to a Catholic country, was to form intimate associations with conspirators and agitators; to espouse their cause; and to fill their despatches to Mr. Seward, Mr. Fish, and Mr. Evarts with absurd but pernicious misrepresentations concerning the relations of the church towards education, civil freedom, and material progress. It may be admitted that many of these agents have erred rather through ignorance than malice; not a few of them have received but a limited education; it is only lately that a knowledge of the French language has been deemed requisite for even an ambassador. Scores of our ministers and chargés d’affaires have been sent abroad, remained for a few years, and returned, without acquiring more than a mere smattering of the language of the country to which they were accredited. Too frequently these misrepresentatives of ours fall into the hands of the agents of the secret sects which are plotting all over the world for the destruction of the church and the overthrow of Christian society, and receive from these sources the erroneous and pernicious views of affairs which they transmit to Washington. One of our diplomatists, returning from a long residence in the capital of a Catholic country, had for a fellow-traveller on the steamship an American Catholic.