A step from the boat at Kingstown puts you into the train for Dublin.  Before we got into motion, a weird shape as of one just escaped from the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill peered in at the window, inviting us to buy the morning papers, or a copy of “the greatest book ever published, ‘Paddy at Home!’” This proved to be a translation of M. de Mandat Grancey’s lively volume, Chez Paddy.  The vendor, “Davy,” is one of the “chartered libertines” of Dublin.  He is supposed to be, and I dare say is, a warm Nationalist, but he has a keen eye to business, and alertly suits his cries to his customers.  Recognising the Conservative member for North Tyrone, he promptly recommended us to buy the Irish Times and the Express as “the two best papers in all Ireland.”  But he smiled approval when I asked for the Freeman’s Journal also, in which I found a report of a speech delivered yesterday by Mr. Davitt at Rathkeale, chiefly remarkable for a sensible protest against the ridiculous and rantipole abuse lavished upon Mr. Balfour by the Nationalist orators and newspapers.  I am not surprised to see this.  Mr. Davitt has the stuff in him of a serious revolutionary leader, and no such man can stomach the frothy and foolish vituperation to which parliamentary agitators are addicted, not in Ireland only.  Unlike Mr. Parnell, who is forced to have one voice for New York and Cincinnati, and another voice for Westminster, Mr. Davitt is free to be always avowedly bent on bringing about a thorough Democratic revolution in Ireland.  I believe him to be too able a man to imagine, as some of the Irish agitators do, that this can be done without the consent of 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.