He proposed to them that they should delay the march on a visit to his cabin near the clouds.  They were forced to decline his invitation to the gentle lion’s mouth; as did Mr. Rumford, very briskly and thankfully.  Mr. Rockney was taken away by Mr. and Mrs. Marbury Dyke.  So the party separated, and the Englishmen were together, and the Irishmen together; and hardly a syllable relating to the Englishmen did the Irishmen say, beyond an allusion to an accident to John Mattock’s yacht off the Irish west-coast last autumn; but the Irishmen were subjected to some remarks by the Englishmen, wherein their qualities as individuals and specimens of a race were critically and neatly packed.  Common sense is necessarily critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict, nor is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day.  Irishmen are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy.  Some of them get along pretty well in America.  The air of their Ireland intoxicates them.  They require the strong hand:  fair legislation, but no show of weakness.  Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see perfect independence in their grasp.  And what would be the spectacle if they were to cut themselves loose from England?  The big ship might be inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift on the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew playing Donnybrook freely.  Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us.  There is the capital blunder, fons et origo.

Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.  Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess.  Treat them as policemen treat highwaymen:  give them the law:  and the law must be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at it.  Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in due course.

‘Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,’ said Mattock, whose party opposed Rockney’s.  ’As to repression, you would have missed that instructive scene this evening at Con O’Donnell’s table, if you had done him the kindness to pick up his glove.  It ’s wisest to let them exhaust their energies upon one another.  Hold off, and they’re soon at work.’

‘What kind of director of a City Company does he make?’ said Rockney.

Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O’Donnell comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the reasonable side, not without shrewdness:  he seemed to be sobered by the money question.