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 Blair,[9] that “to await the results of slow judicial prosecution is to allow crime to be consummated, with the expectation of subsequent punishment, instead of preventing its accomplishment by prompt and direct interference.”  Perhaps Americans take their Government more seriously than Englishmen do.  Certainly we stand by it more sternly in bad weather.  Even so good a Constitutionalist as Professor Parsons at Harvard, I remember, when a student asked him if he would not suspend the Habeas Corpus in the case of a man caught hauling down the American flag, promptly replied, “I would not suspend the Habeas Corpus; I would suspend the Corpus.”

We found no “hansoms” at the Dublin Station, only “outside cars,” and cabs much neater than the London four-wheelers.  One of these brought us at a good pace to Maple’s Hotel in Kildare Street, a large, old-fashioned but clean and comfortable house.  My windows look down upon a stately edifice of stone erecting on Kildare Street for all sorts of educational and “exhibitional” purposes, with the help of an Imperial grant, I am told, and to be called the Leinster Hall.  The style is decidedly composite, with colonnades and loggie and domes and porticos, and recalls the ancient Roman buildings depicted in that fresco of a belated slave-girl knocking at her mistress’s door which with its companion pieces is fast fading away upon the walls of the “House of Livia” on the Palatine.

At one end of this street is the fashionable and hospitable Kildare Street Club; at the other the Shelburne Hotel, known to all Americans.  This seems to have been “furbished-up” since I last saw it.  There, for the last time as it proved, I saw and had speech of my friend of many years, the prince of all preachers in our time, Father Burke of Tallaght and of San Clemente.

I had telegraphed to him from London that I should halt in Dublin for a day, on my way to America, to see him.  He came betimes, to find me almost as badly-off as St. Lawrence upon his gridiron.  The surgeon whom the hotel people had hastily summoned to relieve me from a sudden attack of that endemic Irish ecstasy, the lumbago, had applied what he called the “heroic treatment” on my telling him that I had no time to be ill, but must spend that day with Father Burke, dine that night with Mr. Irving and Mr. Toole, and go on the next day to America.