“Five minutes will do me, Peter,” laughed Father O’Dowd. “The Irish passion for national existence still glowed in our bosoms, and we cried for light. A field for Irish devotion and heroism was what was wanted. We were sick of the hecatombs of victims offered up by the last sad effort. As you are well aware, Mr. Hawthorne, the Tory party came into power during the Fenian scare, and they went to their work in a spirit which would have shamed Oliver Cromwell himself. They fined, fettered, imprisoned, and hanged, until a glut of vengeance seemed an impossibility. ‘This is my chance,’ says Mr. Gladstone. ‘I’ll make capital out of this Fenian scare, and, dashing at the Church Establishment, I’ll gather in the straying bands which once formed the rank and file of the liberal party. England wants a salve, and when she finds herself doing a virtuous thing she will purge her conscience of all her recent evil-doing.’” “I never heard of Mr. Gladstone’s having used those words,” exclaimed the member for Doodleshire pompously. “If he had used them in the House, they would have been ordered to be taken down by the Speaker.” “They are my words, not Mr. Gladstone’s.” “Blur an’ ages!” began Peter O’Brien, but, upon my administering no light touch of the whip to his shoulders, he suddenly pulled himself in. “Now, I ax ye, Masther Freddy, isn’t that the hoighth, now—the hoighth av an ignoraymus? Why, a turf creel—” “Silence, sir!” I exclaimed, in a frenzy of terror lest my guest should by any possibility overhear him. “With the war-whoop of ‘Down with the Irish Church!’ Mr. Gladstone bounded into office at the head of a majority only equalled by that of Sir Robert Peel in forty-one, and, with the faculty of persuading himself into a fervid conscientiousness upon any subject he likes, he flung himself body and soul into the disestablishment of the church established in Ireland. At this uprose the Irish Protestants, who declared that, as faith had been broken with them by the English government, they would repeal the Union by way of retaliation, and kick another crown into the Boyne. ‘Break with us,’ said they, ‘and we’ll break with you. We’ll become Irishmen first and anything else afterwards.’ Well, Mr. Hawthorne, the Irish Church was disestablished—” “I am happy to say that my humble vote was recorded in favor of that measure,” interrupted the M.P. “More power to ye for that, anyhow,” muttered Peter.