Most of them say very little; they are only the supernumeraries, the important topics are reserved for a little later on. The appearance of the hall is the interesting and instructive spectacle. The meeting is evidently composed of men belonging to the lower middle class; they are shopkeepers or clerks. There are a few torn jackets, but very few; in such an assembly one ought to find comparative moderation, but on the contrary, all these men seem really and unquestionably exasperated. When, just now, the students shouted “Long live the Queen,” and when since that an orator has pronounced her name, hisses and groans were heard on all sides. I consider this is one of the most serious aspects of the situation. Mr. Gladstone, once a constitutional minister, has assumed a revolutionary attitude; he has stripped the throne of its “divinity,” the name of the Queen is now treated with more contempt than the names of her ministers. The speakers, to do them justice, make no effort to excite this feeling; they constantly refer to _Home Rule_, but when they allude to the idea of absolute separation, or to a republic, they do so in terms which indicate that they will not even honour the question by discussing it. Do orders, resulting from political calculation, produce this state of things, or does it proceed from real conviction? I cannot tell, I can only state the fact; but I must also own that their contemptuous words were not echoed by the crowd. At last the candidate rose. Sir Thomas Esmonde is quite a young man, it appears that he is twenty-three, but he does not look more than eighteen or twenty. It is said that his fortune is very much reduced, and his family, which is far from adopting the same political views, and which now refuses to meet him, explains that it is with the hope of recovering his position that he has thrown himself into the arms of the League with so much enthusiasm.