Obviously he saw nothing in either show to offend anybody; though he could clearly understand that an intelligent citizen might be vexed if he found himself obliged to sacrifice one of them in order to fully enjoy the other.

Lady Londonderry, it seems, is not yet well enough to cross the Channel; but the Duchess of Marlborough, who is staying here with her nephew the Lord-Lieutenant, has volunteered to assist him in holding the Drawing-Room, whereupon a grave question has arisen in Court circles as to whether the full meed of honours due to a Vice-Queen regnant ought to be paid also to an ex-Vice-Queen.  This is debated by the Dublin dames as hotly as official women in Washington fight over the eternal question of the relative precedence due to the wives of Senators and “Cabinet Ministers.”  It will be a dark day for the democracy when women get the suffrage—­and use it.

At luncheon to-day I met the Attorney-General, Mr. O’Brien, who, with prompt Irish hospitality, asked me to dine with him to-morrow night, and Mr. Wilson of the London Times, an able writer on Irish questions from the English point of view.  Mr. Balfour, who was expected, did not appear, being detained by guests at his own residence in the Park.

I went to see him in the afternoon at the Castle, and found him in excellent spirits; certainly the mildest-mannered and most sensible despot who ever trampled in the dust the liberties of a free people.  He was quite delightful about the abuse which is now daily heaped upon him in speeches and in the press, and talked about it in a casual dreamy way which reminded me irresistibly of President Lincoln, whom, if in nothing else, he resembles alike in longanimity and in length of limb.  He had seen Davitt’s caveat, filed at Rathkeale, against the foolishness of trying to frighten him out of his line of country by calling him bad names.  “Davitt is quite right,” he said, “the thing must be getting to be a bore to the people, who are not such fools as the speakers take them to be.  One of the stenographers told me the other day that they had to invent a special sign for the phrase ‘bloody and brutal Balfour,’ it is used so often in the speeches.”  About the prosecution of Father M’Fadden of Gweedore, he knew nothing beyond the evidence on which it had been ordered.  This he showed me.  If the first duty of a government is to govern, which is the American if not the English way of looking at it, Father M’Fadden must have meant to get himself into trouble when he used such language as this to his people:  “I am the law in Gweedore; I despise the recent Coercion Act; if I got a summons to-morrow, I would not obey it.”  From language like this to the attitude of Father M’Glynn in New York, openly flouting the authority of the Holy See itself, is but an easy and an inevitable step.

Neither “Home Rule” nor any other “Rule” can exist in a country in which men whose words carry any weight are suffered to take up such an attitude.  It is just the attitude of the “Comeouters” in New England during my college days at Harvard, when Parker Pillsbury and Stephen Foster used to saw wood and blow horns on the steps of the meeting-houses during service, in order to free their consciences “and protest against the Sabbatarian laws.”