cause of it is plain. Distrust has grown from disappointment; and this has been the result of a bad selection of men. Ireland has hitherto trusted the talkers rather than the doers. She has given her vote to the noisy demagogues who tickled her ear, and has turned from the men who appealed to her common-sense. For twenty-five years past—with the exception of the abortive Fenian movement—the Irish people have acted as if green flags, denunciation of England, and poetic sunburstry were enough to establish Ireland's claim to national independence.
We trust and believe that a change for the better is coming. Ireland is beginning to see that the men who are able to do something for themselves, the men of judgment and prevision in their own affairs, are likely to bring the best intelligence into national deliberations. Hereafter it will not be a recommendation for an Irish politician that he has failed to make a decent living at everything else.
The rescue of the political prisoners proves that the Irishmen who talk least can do most. It proves also that distrust is not chronic in the Irish people—that they can stake great issues on the faith of single men—when they have selected them for their capacity and intelligence instead of their braggadocio.
Another and most valuable lesson from the rescue has a bearing on the English army. The thousands of Irishmen in the ranks knew that those men were kept in prison because they had been soldiers. It seemed, too, for two or three years past, that those men had been forgotten. The leaders of the movement were free; and no one seemed to care for the poor fellows whose very names were unknown. The soldiers in the army knew that of all the Irish prisoners of '66 and '67, there were none who risked more or who would have been more valuable than a trained dragoon, the indispensable artilleryman, and the steady linesman. To see their
