To see a Catholic priest assume this attitude is almost as amazing as to see an educated Englishman like Mr. Wilfrid Blunt trying to persuade Irishmen that Mr. Balfour made him the confidant of a grisly scheme for doing sundry Irish leaders to death by maltreating them in prison.

I see with pleasure that the masculine instincts of Mr. Davitt led him to allude to this nonsense yesterday at Rathkeale in a half contemptuous way.  Mr. Balfour spoke of it to-day with generosity and good feeling.  “When I first heard of it,” he said, “I resented it, of course, as an outrageous imputation on Mr. Blunt’s character, and denounced it accordingly.  What I have since learned leads me to fear that he really may have said something capable of being construed in this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the exasperation produced by finding himself locked up.”

I heard the story of Mr. Balfour’s meeting with Mr. Blunt very plainly and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House, in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of Britons as of Bedouins.  In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to suppose it possible that Mr. Blunt can have really deceived himself as to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr. Balfour.  This is paying a compliment to Mr. Blunt’s common sense at the expense of his imagination.  In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt said yesterday of Mr. Blunts tale of horror, quite “open to question.”  But, as Mr. Blunt himself has sung, “’Tis conscience makes us sinners, not our sin,” and I have no doubt the author of the Poems of Proteus really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own dark and bloody designs.  Now that he finds himself struck down by the iron hand of this remorseless tyrant, why should he not cry aloud and warn, not Ireland alone, but humanity, against the appalling crimes meditated, not this time in the name of “Liberty,” but in the name of Order?

What especially struck me in talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in Ireland as a cock-pit.  It is the condition of Ireland, and not the gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which is uppermost in his thoughts.  This, I should say, is the best guarantee of his eventual success.