There is no doubt of the substantial value of the English connection to Ireland _now_; but there is just as little that in the past history of this connection there is reason enough for Irish suspicion and dislike. The tenacity of the Irish memory, too, is one of the great political defects and misfortunes of the race. Inability to forget past "wrongs" in the light of present prosperity, is a sure sign of the absence of the political sense; and that the Irish are wanting in the political sense no candid man can deny. That they are really still, to a considerable extent, in the tribal stage of progress, there is little doubt. But they are surrounded by ideas, and institutions, and influences which make it useless to try to raise them out of that stage by the "imperial" method of government, or, in other words, by trying to persuade them that they have richly deserved all their misfortunes, and that the best thing they can do is to let a superior race mould their destinies. If it were possible for Englishmen to be a little more patient with their weaknesses, to yield a little more to the childish vanities and aspirations which form the nearest approach they have yet made to a feeling of nationality, and take upon themselves in word as well as in deed their share of the horrible burdens of Irish history, it would do more toward winning them Irish confidence than anything Americans are ever likely to say. MR. HORACE GREELEY There has been something almost tragic about the close of Mr. Greeley's career. After a life of, on the whole, remarkable success and prosperity, he fell finally under the weight of accumulated misfortunes. Nobody who heard him declare that "he accepted the Cincinnati Convention and its consequences," but must be struck by the illustration of what is called "the irony of fate," which nearly everything that occurred afterwards affords. His nomination, from whatever point of view we look at it, was undoubtedly a high honor. The manner in which it was received down to the Baltimore Convention was very flattering. Whether it was a proper thing to "beat Grant" or not, that so large and so shrewd a body of his countrymen should have thought Mr. Greeley the man to do it was a great compliment. It found him, too, in possession of all the influence which the successful pursuit of his own calling could give a man--the most powerful editor in the Union, surrounded by friends and admirers, feared or courted by nearly everybody in public life, and in the full enjoyment of widespread popular confidence in his integrity. In six short months he was well-nigh undone. He had endured a humiliating defeat, which seemed to him to indicate the loss of what was his dearest possession, the affection of the American people; he had lost the weight in public affairs which he had built up by thirty years of labor; he saw his property and, as he thought, that of his friends diminished by the attempt to give him a prize which