of the district of Columbia? I am afraid they would have been terribly
Irish.


I know very well the risk I run, in citing all these precedents and
parallels, of seeming to justify, or at all events to palliate, Irish
lawlessness. But I am not doing anything of the kind. I am trying to
illustrate a somewhat trite remark which I recently made: "that
government is a very practical business, and that those succeed best in
it who bring least sentiment or enthusiasm to the conduct of their
affairs." The government of Ireland, like the government of all other
countries, is a piece of business--a very difficult piece of business, I
admit--and therefore horror over Irish doings, and the natural and human
desire to "get even with" murderers and moonlighters, by denying the
community which produces them something it would like much to possess,
should have no influence with those who are charged with Irish
government. It is only in nurseries and kindergartens that we can give
offenders their exact due and withhold their toffee until they have
furnished satisfactory proofs of repentance. Rulers of men have to
occupy themselves mainly with the question of drying up the sources of
crime, and often, in order to accomplish this, to let much crime and
disorder go unwhipped of justice.

With the state of mind which cannot bear to see any concessions made to
the Irish Nationalists because they are such wicked men, in which so
many excellent Englishmen, whom we used to think genuine political
philosophers, are now living, we are very familiar in the United States.
It is a state of mind which prevailed in the Republican party with
regard to the South, down to the election of 1884, and found constant
expression on the stump and in the newspapers in what is described, in