Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/284

 there, but I soon discovered he came on a special mission. After a disquisition at large he took occasion to say that the Lord-Lieutenant, who was a man of philosophy and penetration, often told him how clearly he discriminated between statesmen who aimed to bring about constitutional changes by constitutional means, even though they included the means which brought in the House of Nassau and the House of Hanover, and Anarchists who loved terrorism and violence for their own sake. He recognised me as belonging to the former class. I interrupted him with a bantering laugh, and told him I was very busy just then, but as soon as I had leisure I would inquire what weakness or folly I had committed that had rendered me liable to the favour of the Earl of Clarendon. At a Lord Mayor's dinner shortly after Pierce Mahony, known in those days as the Prince of Attorneys, exhibited a strong desire to discuss some question with me, and kept parading me about for a time, and then made a full stop. A little crowd of aides-de-camp and the like suddenly dispersed, and I found I had been inveigled into a position fit for my personal inspection by the Viceroy. My appearance must not have been satisfactory to his Excellency, for I heard from time to time in the subterranean whispers in which Court secrets escape that I was to be made an example, and he spared no pains in the end to accomplish that result; but the most shocking example the era has yielded was a Viceroy who entered into friendly and familiar relations with the editor of the World, a journal living by hush-money and private slander.

The best men in the Confederation thought it their first duty at this time to make the real aims of the body clear and certain, a purpose which a single extract from the history of the period will sufficiently illustrate:—