the 8th of October.  Without alarm, without warning—­as if at the throwing up of a rocket in the dead of night, or at the summons of a signal gun—­the great capital, almost as populous as Naples or Vienna, and far more dangerous in its excitement, found itself under military possession by a little army—­so perfect in its appointments as to make resistance hopeless, and by that very hopelessness (as reconciling the most insubordinate to a necessity) making irritation impossible.  Last month we warned Mr O’Connell of “the uplifted thunderbolt” suspended in the Jovian hands of the Wellesley, but ready to descend when the “dignus vindice nodus” should announce itself.  And this, by the way, must have been the “thunderbolt,” this military demonstration, which, in our blind spirit of prophecy doubtless, we saw dimly in the month of September last; so that we are disposed to recant our confession even of partial error as to the coming fortunes of Repeal, and to request that the reader will think of us as of very decent prophets.  But, whether we were so or not, the Government (it is clear) acted in the prophetic spirit of military wisdom.  “The prophetic eye of taste”—­as a brilliant expression for that felicitous prolepsis by which the painter or the sculptor sees already in its rudiments what will be the final result of his labours—­is a phrase which we are all acquainted with, and the spirit of prophecy, the far-stretching vision of sagacity, is analogously conspicuous in the arts of Government, military or political, when providing for the contingencies that may commence in pseudo-patriotism, or the possibilities that may terminate in rebellion.  Whether Government saw those contingencies, whether Government calculated those possibilities in June last—­that is one part of the general question which we have been discussing; and whether it was to a different estimate of such chances in summer and in autumn, or to a necessity for time in preparing against them, that we must ascribe the very different methods of the Government in dealing with the sedition at different periods—­that is the other part of the question.  But this is certain—­that whether seeing and measuring from the first, or suddenly awakened to the danger of late—­in any case, the Government has silently prepared all along; forestalling evils that possibly never were to arise, and shaping remedies for disasters which possibly to themselves appeared romantic.  To provide for the worst, is an ordinary phrase, but what is the worst?  Commonly it means the last calamity that experience suggests; but in the admirable arrangements of Government it meant the very worst that imagination could conceive—­building upon treason at home in alliance with hostility from abroad.  At a time when resistance seemed supremely improbable, yet, because amongst the headlong desperations of a confounded faction even this was possible, the ministers determined to deal with it as a certainty.