Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/318

booter in politics, went over to Ireland in February to sow in the blood-clotted Orange brain the seed of civil war. Churchill was a light weight, a "Sim Tappertit" in religious warfare, but O' Reilly scented the more serious danger in the disaffection of Chamberlain. He said:

With Chamberlain's aid, if Chamberlain is as false as we believe him to be, they may defeat the Liberals at the next general election, which will possibly come this year. But Churchill's present policy tells against himself. It is not clever. It shows the selfish and desperate gambler with the' stocked sleeve. It calls out a stern sentiment in England and sets Mr. Gladstone and all honest Liberals on guard. It will deter even Chamberlain from trusting his future to such allies as Tappertit and the Orangemen.

There was a "bread riot" in London, in January, and some people thought they saw in it the beginning of the long-delayed English commune. O'Reilly knew the British animal better. He wrote:

The Parisian or Russian rioter is urged by his heart and soul and head, but the English rioter only obeys his stomach.

The masses in England are, with all the boasted freedom of England, more deficient in the spirit of liberty, in the dignity of humanity, than the common people of any other country. In France, in the last century, and in Russia and Germany in this, the people knew that the luxurious, immoral, overbearing aristocrats had more than a just share of the national wealth. In England, the aristocrat, though greedier and more intolerant than all other "noblemen," is accepted, fawned upon, almost worshiped by the whole landless, shop-keeping, pend-riving, hard-handed community.

But the worm will turn at the cruel foot. Where oppression fails to provoke rebellion, scorn may succeed. Oppression is the heaving of the sea; insult the breaking of the billow. Oppression is the whip that bruises; scorn the lash that cuts. "Drive over the dogs!" cried a titled lady to her coachman, in the beginning of the late London riots. She was allowed to pass. But a few hours later the carriage of a great lady, sister of the Duke of Abercorn, was stopped in Piccadilly, and when the Countess showed her imperious temper (men do not act like this without provocation), one of the mob, says a correspondent, advanced to the side of the carriage and deliberately slapped her face, exclaiming, "We will hang you yet!"

But, after all, the symptoms are only premonitory, even if they be indeed earthquakes of society and not the mere shivering of the social