As to Mr. O'Connell himself, it is useless, and it argues some thick darkness of mind, to remonstrate or generally to address any arguments from whatsoever quarter, which either appeal to a sense of truth, which, secondly, manifest inconsistencies, or, thirdly, which argue therein a tendency ruinous to himself. Let us think. Burke asserted of himself, and to our belief truly, that having at different periods set his face in different directions--now to the east, now to the west, now pointing to purposes of relaxation or liberality, now again to purposes of coercive and popular restraint--he had notwithstanding been uniform, if measured upon a higher scale. Transcending objects, coinciding neither instantly with the first, nor except by accident with the last, but indifferently aided by aristocratic forces or by democratic, shifting weights which sometimes called for accessories of gravity, sometimes for subtraction, mighty fluctuating wheels which sometimes needed flywheels to moderate or harmonize, sometimes needed concurrent wheels to urge or aggravate their impetus--these were the powers which he had found himself summoned to calculate, to check, to support, the vast algebraic equation of government; for this he had strengthened substantially by apparent contrarieties of policy; and in a system of watch-work so exquisite as to vary its fine balances eternally, eternally he had consulted by redressing the errors emergent, by varying the poise in order that he might _not_ vary the equipoise, by correcting inequalities, or by forestalling extremes. That was a man of heroic build, and of him it might be said at his death, 'Truly this man was a son of Anak.' Now, of Mr. O'Connell a man might affirm something similar; that as with regard to Edmund Burke it is altogether useless to detect contradictions in form, seeing that he knows of this, that he justifies this, glories in this, vehemently demands praise for this contradiction, as all discord is harmony not understood, planned in the letter and overruled in the spirit; so may O'Connell say, 'Gentlemen, grubs, reptiles, vermin, trouble not yourselves to find out contradictions or discords in my conduct; vex not your slender faculties by arraying hosts of promises that defeat promises, or principles that destroy principles--you shall not need to labour; I will make you a present of three huge canisters laden and running over with the flattest denials in one breath of that which I affirmed in another. But, like Edmund Burke, I register my conduct by another table and by its final result. On the dial which you see, the hands point thus and thus; but upon a higher and transcendent dial these fingers do but precipitate or retard one gigantic hand, pointing always and monotonously to the unity of a perfect selfishness. The everlasting tacking in my course gives me often the air of retrograding and losing; but, in fact, these retrogressions are momentary, these losings of my object are no more than seeming, are still but the same stealthy creeping up under cover of frequent compliances with the breeze that happens to thwart me, towards the one eternal pole of my own self-interest; that is the pole-star which only never sets, and I flatter myself that amidst vast apparent wanderings or multiplied divergences there will be detected by the eye of the philosopher a consistency in family objects which is absolute, a divine unity of selfishness.'