THE THREE KINGDOMS.

THE deep dulness under which everything had lain
since the new parliament got itself elected, and
which not even a close-running fire of fatal railway
accidents availed to lighten or enliven, was suddenly
broken through at last by electric flashes from the other
side of the Atlantic, through which the quidnuncs
saw hopeful gleams of war. For several days nothing
to them could be more promising. Excitement
gradually rose, the funds gradually fell, and Irish
patriots sent forth whoops of eager encouragement
at beholding the young western giant in the very
act of stripping to whip the old beldame of the seas.
One of these patriotic men, who will shortly take his
seat at Westminster in the character of a legislator
for the welfare of these islands, took the opportunity
of putting a suppositious case, on which he dwelt
with much unction. Suppose, he said, an H. M. S.
frigate is broadsided by an U. S. frigate in the Bay of
Fundy some fine morning, and suppose Louis Napoleon
selects that precise morning for his threatened
demonstration, and a collision actually takes place
within earshot of Gibraltar, and England has to withdraw
all her soldiers from the Cape and from
India to meet the troubles at home—and—what
then, does the reader imagine? Why then, exclaims
this patriot member of parliament with an
irrepressible exultation, it is more than probable that
the Cape, India, the Canadas, and the West Indies,
might be all lost to her Britannic Majesty's crown,
and very, very possible, that "the French army
might pass next winter in London!"

It would be hard to withhold sympathy from a
disappointment necessarily so bitter as the
overthrow of these airy hopes must have involved to so
very sanguine a patriot. For what business had Lord
Derby to raise expectations which he afterwards shrunk
from making real! Why should Sir John Pakington have
written to tell our British Colonial fishermen that
they should henceforward be protected from American
competition in their fisheries; why should Mr.
Crampton write to Mr. Webster that all future
encroachments in Fundy and other bays were now to be
guarded against by the presence of a small English
fleet; and why should the Duke of Northumberland
already have anticipated Mr. Crampton by dispatching
the "small English fleet " to Fundy Bay with instructions
to operate before the Americans knew anything
about it;—if it was all to end, after a few smart shocks
of stump oratory from Mr. Webster, in a sudden swearing
of eternal friendship in Piccadilly between Lord
Malmesbury and Mr. Abbott Lawrence, the Yankee
first pocketing everything that could be got from the
dispute? Patriotic Irishmen have much reason to
complain. Could any one imagine that "knuckle
under" should so soon have been the order of the
day? Was it within the scope of possibility that the
flag that braved a thousand years, &c. &c, should so
strike of a sudden to a shoal of Fundy cod-bangers?
Was it for a moment credible that the British
Lion should show himself such a poor old mangy brute
as to run away with his tail between his legs on the
mere approach of the eagle's talons to clutch at his
mane! To patriotic Irishmen, ever on the anxious
look-out for "Erin's opportunity," nothing of this was
imaginable, possible, credible; and a fair amount of
sympathy for violated hopes and crushed expectations
is thus far their due. Sensible Frenchmen, we are
bound to add, appear to have kept their wits clearer
by taking a less ardent view of France's "opportunity."
They saw from the first how, and why, the thing
would end. "War," said Armand Bertin quietly in
the Journal des Debats, at the time when bella! horrida
bella! was the general note, "war won't arise out of it;
and what will prevent war arising, is the firm
determination of the English people. In the present state
of European politics, and in the prospect of the dark
future which hangs over the world, England would
rather sacrifice a hundred Derby ministries than her
alliance with the United States." Truer word was
never spoken than this, O M. Armand Bertin! and
it is to the credit of the American president that
he, too, with the same sort of prescience, should have
anticipated the same result in his remark to an
English visitor on the first clamorous outbreak, "Oh!
the time is gone by for Great Britain and America
ever to think of settling their disputes by war."
What honest Englishman does not feel with citizen
Fillmore?

So that cloud has passed away, and patriotic Irishmen
have had to solace themselves with such comfort
as might be suggested to patriotic hearts, by a coroner's
verdict of wilful murder opportunely found by an
Irish jury against an Irish county magistrate and eight
English soldiers of the 31st regiment—the latter for
having fired and killed, and the former for having been
present when they fired and killed, six of a party of
rioters who had fallen foul of the soldiers in their
capacity of military escort to a party of voters conveyed
in that fashion to vote against the Liberal candidates
in the Clare election. The rioters fired upon were
undoubtedly a violent mob under leading of certain
of the priests; the voters sought to be rescued were as
certainly under violent restraint to secure their votes,
against their own desires and persuasions, for the use
of their landlords; and altogether an affair more
scandalously illustrative of the existing condition of Irish
patriotism on both sides of the question, it would be
extremely difficult to conceive. The verdict is but
the finishing touch, completing and perfecting the
antecedents. It finds the soldiers wilful murderers
for having fired and no orders given; and it finds the
magistrate a wilful murderer for having given orders
to fire. The most intensely partisan of juries might
hardly have been expected to find guilt in more than
one of the parties charged, but a jury of Irish partisans
had no notion of so botching the business. And
to do them justice, the exertion required to discover
guilt in either, left little more requisite for the