Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/49

 of the Galway Thunderer?" "Be more accurate, my dear boy, the Galway Irishman" "And how came you, you Cockney impostor, to edit the Irishman?" "Why not, my son? I am more Hibernian than the Hibernians. I can spout like Burgh Quay, handle a cudgel like Donnybrook Fair, and I have got an Irish wife; I'll trouble you to beat that record!" "And your hopeful experiment, does it still prosper?" "No, sir; that great journal which I created died in my arms." "Died!" exclaimed his friend. "How did it die with that tremendous backing of agitators and priests you used to parade in your leaders?" "That was just it, dear; it died of too many patrons." "What do you mean?" "You don't know, my son," rejoined the ex-editor, "what a Galway patron does for his favourite journal." "No; tell me." "He dines with the editor every time he comes to town, writes a libel once a quarter, and never pays his subscription." I decline all responsibility for Mr. H's epigram, which is too good, however, to be suppressed.

My honorary employment on the Morning Register was pleasantly varied by a temporary engagement as official reporter to a Royal Commission. The subject on which a commission was appointed to report will help to explain the puzzling fact that the representation of the metropolis fell frequently to men of the most unpopular politics. The Irish Reform Act had been so constructed that a citizen of Dublin could not vote in a Parliamentary election without paying numerous rates and taxes, sometimes amounting to as many as ten separate payments. But the Dublin Corporation in which a Catholic had not sat for four generations, did not consider these barriers against Popery sufficient. Some of their officers, it was alleged, had received secret instructions to absent themselves when an election was approaching, and so render it impossible for electors to comply with the law. This was the complaint which the commission was instructed to investigate. Thomas Drummond asked the editor of the Register to send him a competent reporter, and I was selected. When the inquiry terminated I had some personal communication with that remarkable man, which I have described elsewhere. The report of the commission effectually promoted