a whole-community of litigants should have gone on paying black-mail in this egregiously stupid manner. I was considerably astonished, and a little troubled, to find so many of my friends among Northern Republicans--men who had gone through and borne the burden of the War of Secession--not, indeed, sympathising with the Irish, whom they dislike and distrust more than we do, but saying: “Oh, you had better let them have their own way. Look at our experience of twenty years after the war. Until we let the Southern States have their own way, and withdrew the troops, and threw over the carpetbaggers, we had no peace; and now they are just as quiet as New England.” To which, of course, I made the obvious reply: “Let the seceding States have their own way, did you? Why, I had always understood that they went out because you elected a free-soil President, pledged to oppose any further extension of their peculiar institution, and that at the end of the war that institution had not only been confined within its old limits, but had absolutely disappeared. The parallel would have held if you had said to Mr. Jefferson Davis and his backers in the spring of 1861, ‘Do what you please as to your negroes; take them where you will; it is a purely domestic matter for you to settle in your own way.’ Instead of this, you said, ‘You shall not take your slaves where you please, and you shall not go out of the Union.’ In the same way, we have to say now to the Irish, ‘You shall not do what you please with the owners of property in Ireland, and you shall not go out of the Union.’” You will be glad to hear that, wherever I went, there seemed to be the expectation of a revival of trade in the near future. I can see no ground myself for the expectation, so long as all industry remains in its present competitive phase, and the power of production goes on increasing instead of diminishing. Why should men not desire as eagerly to take each other’s trade this next year as they did last year? But the knowing people think otherwise, and I suppose that is good for something. Westward Ho! 2nd April 1887.