‘For his desertion of the people.’ ‘Really, Mr. Wentworth, you are amusing. You make me laugh,’ said the reverend father, looking uncommonly angry. ‘Should the priest not take the part of the people?’ ‘Certainly. But he does nothing of the kind. Is he not the partisan of the popular agitator? Does he not place himself by the side of men whose language is utterly false? Who stimulates the passions of the people to fever heat? who teach the poor Irish—ignorant as they are, assassins as I fear a few of them are, cowards as they are when human life is to be saved—that they have every virtue under heaven?’ ‘Indeed, Mr. Wentworth,’ said the priest indignantly, ‘I know nothing of the kind. Ireland has been trampled under foot by the murdering English, and now we are within measurable distance of Home Rule.’ ‘And what will be the good of that?’ ‘That the Irish will have their rights at last; that we shall be free of English tyranny and English injustice.’ ‘Yes, you will change King Stork for King Log. Irishmen are bound to quarrel. I was at Queenstown last summer, and taking up the Cork paper, I read an account of the meeting of the Harbour Commissioners. In the course of the meeting, one member denounced another as a humbug and miscreant of the vilest character, and said, old as he was, he was prepared to fight him with the weapons God had given him, and thereupon asked him to step into the next room and have it out. When I mentioned the matter to a priest, he said sarcastically, “Of course there are no rows in the British House of Commons.” I replied that the questions discussed there were more likely to lead to heated debate than the trifling matters a set of Harbour Commissioners would have to deal with. Furthermore, I added that when we did have a row, it was often begun by Irishmen, and generally connected with Irish affairs.’ ‘Ireland must be governed by Irish ideas; that is all we want.’ ‘Let us look at Scotland. England and Scotland were joined together, and the union was as much hated by the Scotch as the Irish union is hated by your people now. Look at England and Scotland now. Are they not one people—equally great, equally flourishing, equally happy under what was, at one time, a detested union? Why should not England and Ireland get on just as well? Had we given way to Scotch ideas, we should now be at loggerheads.’ ‘Unfortunately, you see, in Ireland,’ said the priest, ‘public opinion is the other way.’ ‘Public opinion! What public opinion have you, where boycotting and the bullet of the midnight assassin, who, coward-like, waits for his unsuspecting victim in a ditch or behind a stone wall, have created a reign of terror under which all freedom of thought and action is suppressed? Public opinion does not exist in Ireland. The Irish are down-trodden indeed. No Russian serfs are worse off.’