Ireland Since Parnell | Page 5

genuine outburst of friendliness on the part
of the Irish masses to England. And at the General Election of 1885
Parnell returned from Ireland with a solid phalanx of eighty-four
members--eager, invincible, enthusiastic, bound unbreakably together

in loyalty to their country and in devotion to their leader.
From 1885 to 1890 there was a general forgiving and forgetting of
historic wrongs and ancient feuds. The Irish Nationalists were willing
to clasp hands across the sea in a brotherhood of friendship and even of
affection, but there stood apart, in open and flaming disaffection, the
Protestant minority in Ireland, who were in a state of stark terror that
the Home Rule Bill of 1886 meant the end of everything for them--the
end of their brutal ascendancy and probably also the confiscation of
their property and the ruin of their social position.
Then, as on a more recent occasion, preparations for civil war were
going on in Ulster, largely of English Party manufacture, and more
with an eye to British Party purposes than because of any sincere
convictions on the rights of the ascendancy element. Still the Grand
Old Man carried on his indomitable campaign for justice to Ireland,
notwithstanding the unfortunate cleavage which had taken place in the
ranks of his own Party, and it does not require any special gift of
prevision to assert, nor is it any unwarrantable assumption on the facts
to say, that the alliance between the Liberal and Irish Parties would
inevitably have triumphed as soon as a General Election came had not
the appalling misunderstanding as to Gladstone's "Nullity of
Leadership" letter flung everything into chaos and irretrievably ruined
the hopes of Ireland for more than a generation.
And this brings me to what I regard as the greatest of Irish
tragedies--the deposition and the dethronement of Parnell under
circumstances which will remain for all time a sadness and a sorrow to
the Irish race.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Devoy, although banished, did turn up secretly in Mayo
when the Land League was being organised, and his orders were
supreme with the secret societies.]

CHAPTER II
A LEADER IS DETHRONED!
In the cabin, in the shieling, in the home of the "fattest" farmer, as well
as around the open hearth of the most lowly peasant, in town and
country, wherever there were hearts that hoped for Irish liberty and that
throbbed to the martial music of "the old cause," the name of Parnell
was revered with a devotion such as was scarcely ever rendered to any
leader who had gone before him. A halo of romance had woven itself
around his figure and all the poetry and passion of the mystic Celtic
spirit went forth to him in the homage of a great loyalty and regard.
The title of "The Uncrowned King of Ireland" was no frothy
exuberance as applied to him--for he was in truth a kingly man, robed
in dignity, panoplied in power, with a grand and haughty bearing
towards the enemies of his people--in all things a worthy chieftain of a
noble race. The one and only time in life I saw him was when he was a
broken and a hunted man and when the pallor of death was upon his
cheeks, but even then I was impressed by the majesty of his bearing,
the dignity of his poise, the indescribably magnetic glance of his
wondrous eyes, and the lineaments of power in every gesture, every
tone and every movement. He awed and he attracted at the same time.
He stood strikingly out from all others at that meeting at Tralee, where
I was one of a deputation from Killarney who presented him with an
address of loyalty and confidence, which, by the way, I, as a youthful
journalist starting on my own adventurous career, had drafted. It was
one of his last public appearances, and the pity of it all that it should be
so, when we now know, with the fuller light and knowledge that has
been thrown upon that bitterest chapter of our tribulations, that with the
display of a little more reason and a juster accommodation of temper,
Parnell might have been saved for his country, and the whole history of
Ireland since then--if not, indeed, of the world--changed for the better.
But these are vain regrets and it avails not to indulge them, though it is
permissible to say that the desertion of Parnell brought its own swift
retribution to the people for whom he had laboured so potently and
well.

I have read all the authentic literature I could lay hold of bearing upon
the Parnell imbroglio, and it leaves me with the firm conviction that if
there had not been an almost unbelievable concatenation of errors and
misunderstandings and stupid blunderings, Parnell need never have
been sacrificed. And