This we do not question. But to will is not to do; and Mr. O'Connell, with a true loyalty to his one object of private aims, has _not_ maintained the consistency of his policy. All men know that he has adventured within the limits of conspiracy; that could not be for his benefit. He has touched even the dark penumbra of treason; that could not but risk the sum of his other strivings. But he who has failed for himself in a strife so absolute, for that only must be distrusted by his countrymen.
[19] 'To horsewhip,' etc. Let it not be said that this is any slander of ours; would that we could pronounce it a slander! But those who (like ourselves) have visited Ireland extensively know that the parish priest uses a horsewhip, in many circumstances, as his professional _insigne_.
[20] Look at Lord Waterford's case, in the very month of November, 1843. Is there a county in all England that would have tamely witnessed his expulsion from amongst them by fire, and by sword and by poison?
NOTE BY THE EDITOR.--This article on O'Connell, written in the end of 1843, is printed, not on account of any political reference it might be presumed to have, but only because of its historical and literary interest. Apart from the light it may throw on De Quincey's leanings, as, in certain respects, distinctly in the direction of patriotic Toryism of the most rampant type, it may be of value as suggesting how essentially, in not a few points, the Irish question to-day remains precisely as it was in the time of O'Connell; and how the Tories of to-day are apt to view it from precisely the same plane as those of 1843. It might also be cited as another proof not only of De Quincey's very keen interest in all the leading questions of the time, but as an illustration of the John Bull warmth and heat which he, the dreamer, the recluse, the lover of abstract problems, could bring into such discussions. Here, at all events, his views were definite enough, and stated with a bold precision of English plainness that would have pleased the most pronouncedly Tory or Unionist newspaper editors of that day.
To speak in the simplicity of truth, caring not for party or partisan, is not the France of this day, the France which has issued from that great furnace of the Revolution, a better, happier, more hopeful France than the France of 1788? Allowing for any evil, present or reversionary, in the political aspects of France, that may yet give cause for anxiety, can a wise man deny that from the France of 1840, under Louis Philippe of Orleans, ascends to heaven a report of far happier days from the sons and daughters of poverty than from the France of Louis XVI.? Personally that sixteenth Louis was a good king, sorrowing for the abuses in the land, and willing (at least, after affliction had sharpened his reflecting conscience), had that choice been allowed him, to have redeemed them by any personal sacrifice. But that was not possible. Centuries of misrule are not ransomed by an individual ruin; and had it been possible that the dark genius of his family, the same who once tolled funeral knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, and called him out as a martyr hurrying to meet his own sacrifice--could we suppose this gloomy representative of his family destinies to have met him in some solitary apartment of the Tuileries or Versailles, some twilight gallery of ancestral portraits, he could have met him with the purpose of raising the curtain from before the long series of his household woes--from him the king would have learned that no personal ransom could be accepted for misgovernment so ancient. Leviathan is not so tamed. Arrears so vast imply a corresponding accountability, corresponding by its amount, corresponding by its personal subjects. Crown and people--all had erred; all must suffer. Blood must flow, tears must be shed through a generation; rivers of lustration must be thrown through that Augean accumulation of guilt.