Sketches New and Old eBook

Every man in the community is a missionary and carries a brick to admonish the erring with.  The law has tried to break this up, but not with perfect success.  It has decreed that irritating “party cries” shall not be indulged in, and that persons uttering them shall be fined forty shillings and costs.  And so, in the police court reports every day, one sees these fines recorded.  Last week a girl of twelve years old was fined the usual forty shillings and costs for proclaiming in the public streets that she was “a Protestant.”  The usual cry is, “To hell with the Pope!” or “To hell with the Protestants!” according to the utterer’s system of salvation.

One of Belfast’s local jokes was very good.  It referred to the uniform and inevitable fine of forty shillings and costs for uttering a party cry—­and it is no economical fine for a poor man, either, by the way.  They say that a policeman found a drunken man lying on the ground, up a dark alley, entertaining himself with shouting, “To hell with!” “To hell with!” The officer smelt a fine—­informers get half.

“What’s that you say?”

“To hell with!”

“To hell with who?  To hell with what?”

“Ah, bedad, ye can finish it yourself—­it’s too expansive for me!”

I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct, is finely put in that.

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION

Washington, December, 1867.

I have resigned.  The government appears to go on much the same, but there is a spoke out of its wheel, nevertheless.  I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, and I have thrown up the position.  I could see the plainest disposition on the part of the other members of the government to debar me from having any voice in the counsels of the nation, and so I could no longer hold office and retain my self-respect.  If I were to detail all the outrages that were heaped upon me during the six days that I was connected with the government in an official capacity, the narrative would fill a volume.  They appointed me clerk of that Committee on Conchology and then allowed me no amanuensis to play billiards with.  I would have borne that, lonesome as it was, if I had met with that courtesy from the other members of the Cabinet which was my due.  But I did not.  Whenever I observed that the head of a department was pursuing a wrong course, I laid down everything and went and tried to set him right, as it was my duty to do; and I never was thanked for it in a single instance.  I went, with the best intentions in the world, to the Secretary of the Navy, and said: 

“Sir, I cannot see that Admiral Farragut is doing anything but skirmishing around there in Europe, having a sort of picnic.  Now, that may be all very well, but it does not exhibit itself to me in that light.  If there is no fighting for him to do, let him come home.  There is no use in a man having a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion.  It is too expensive.  Mind, I do not object to pleasure excursions for the naval officers—­pleasure excursions that are in reason—­pleasure excursions that are economical.  Now, they might go down the Mississippi on a raft—­”