Democratic England, and he has lived too much in England, and knows the
English democracy too well, I suspect, not to know that to abuse an
executive officer for determination and vigour is the surest way to make
him popular. Calling Mr. Forster "Buckshot" Forster did him no harm. On
the contrary, the epithet might have helped him to success had not Mr.
Gladstone given way behind him at the most critical moment of his
grapple with the revolutionary organisation in Ireland. We hear a great
deal about resistance to tyrants being obedience to God, but I fear that
obedience to God is not the strongest natural passion of the human
heart, and I doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted
by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big
stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had
the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI. to
the scaffold.

Nobody who had not learned from the speeches made in England, and the
cable despatches sent to America, that freedom of speech and of the
press has been brutally trampled under foot in Ireland by a "Coercion"
Government would ever suspect it from reading the Dublin papers which I
this morning bought.

As a Democratic journalist I had some practical knowledge of a true
"Coercion" government in America a quarter of a century ago. The
American editor who had ventured in 1862 to publish in a New York or
Philadelphia newspaper a letter from Washington, speaking of the
Unionist Government by President Lincoln, as the letter from London
published to-day in the _Freeman's Journal_ speaks of the Unionist
Government of Lord Salisbury, would have found himself in one of the
casemates of Fort Lafayette within twenty-four hours. Our Republican
rulers acted upon the maxim laid down by Mr. Tilden's friend, Montgomery