_always_ destroying their power to discountenance[20] evil-doers. Here is the sad excuse. But, for all that, we must affirm that, if the Irish landed gentry do not yet come forward to retrieve the ground which they have forfeited by inertia, history will record them as passive colluders with the Dublin repealers. The evil is so operatively deep, looking backward or forward, that we have purposely brought it forward in a second aspect, viz., as contrasted with the London press. For the one, as we have been showing, there is a strong plea in palliation; for the other there is none. Let us be frank. This is what we affirm, that it was, it is, it will be hereafter, within the powers of the London press to have extinguished the Repeal or any similar agitation; they could have done this, and this they have _not_ done. But let us also not be misunderstood. Do we say this in a spirit of disrespect? Are we amongst the parties who (when characterizing the American press) infamously say, 'Let us, however, look homewards to our own press, and be silent for very shame'? Are we the people to join the vicious correspondent of an evening paper whom but a week ago we saw denouncing the editor of the _Examiner_ newspaper as a public nuisance, and recommending him as a fit subject of some degrading punishment, for no better reason than that he had exercised his undoubted right of exposing delinquencies or follies in a garrulous lord? Far be such vilenesses from us. We honour the press of this country. We know its constitution, and we know the mere impossibility (were it only from the great capital required) that any but men of honour and sensibilities and conspicuous talent, and men brilliantly accomplished in point of education, should become writers or editors of a _leading_ journal, or indeed of any daily journal. Here and there may float _in gurgite vasto_ some atrocious paper lending itself upon system to the villainies of private slander. But such a paper is sure to be an inconsiderable one in the mere sense of property, and therefore, by a logical consequence in our frame of society, _every_ way inconsiderable--rising without effort, sinking without notice. In fact, the whole staff and establishment of newspapers have risen in social consideration within our own generation; and at this moment not merely proprietors and editors, but reporters and other ministerial agents to these vast engines of civility, have all ascended in their superior orders to the highest levels of authentic responsibility.