O'Connell monologue — Waste: A Tragedy, In Four Acts

Will you please to make allowance, Lord Charles, for a mediaeval scholar's contempt of modern government? You at least will partly understand his horror as a Catholic at the modern superstitions in favour of popular opinion and control which it encourages. You see, Lord Horsham, I am not a party man, only a little less enthusiastic for the opposite cries than for his own. You appealed very strangely to my feelings of patriotism for this country; but you see even my own is--in the twentieth century--foreign to me. From my point of view neither Mr. Trebell, nor you, nor the men you have just defeated, nor any discoverable man or body of men will make laws which matter ... or differ in the slightest. You are all part of your age and you all voice--though in separate keys, or even tunes they may be--only the greed and follies of your age. That you should do this and nothing more is, of course, the democratic ideal. You will forgive my thinking tenderly of the statesmanship of the first Edward.