192 Irish Woollen Company, 193 Mr. Davitt and Mr. Blunt, 193 Mr. Davitt's character and position, 192-199
CHAPTER VI.
Ennis, Feb. 18, 200 Return to Ireland, 200 Irish Nationalists, 200, 201 Home Rule and Protection, 202 Luggacurren and Mr. O'Brien, 204 Dublin to Limerick and Ennis, 204, 205 Colonel Turner, 205 Architecture of Ennis Courthouse--Resemblance to White House, Washington, 206 Number of public-houses in Ennis, and in Ireland, 207, 208 Innkeepers of Milltown Malbay, 208,209 Father White (see Note E), 209 Sir Francis Head, 210, 211 Different opinions in Ennis, 212, 213 State of trade in Ennis, 213, 214 Edenvale, Heronry, 215 _seq._ Feb. 19, 215 The men of Ennis at Edenvale, 216 Killone Abbey, 218-221 Stephen J. Meany, 220 "Holy Well" of St. John, 221 Superstition as to rabbits, 222 Religious practices under Penal Laws, 222 Experiences under National League, 223, 224 Case of George Pilkington, 224-226 Trees at Edenvale, 227 Moonlighters, a reproduction of Whiteboys, 227, 228 Difficulty in getting men to work, 228 A testimonial to Mr. Austen Mackay, 229-232 Effect of testimonials, 232 Feb. 20, 232 The case of Mrs. Connell at Milltown Malbay, 232 _seq._ Estate accounts and prices, 240 A rent-warner, 245 Mr. Redmond, M.P., 245 Father White's Sermon, 246 A photograph, 246
APPENDIX.
NOTES--
A. Mr. Gladstone and the American War (Prologue xxix), 249 B. Mr. Parnell and the Dynamiters (Prologue xxxiii), 251 C. The American "Suspects" of 1881 (Prologue xlvii), 255 D. The Parnellites and the English Parties (Prologue l.), 262 E. The "Boycott" at Miltown-Malbay (p. 209) 264
PROLOGUE.
I.
This book is a record of things seen, and of conversations had, during a series of visits to Ireland between January and June 1888.
These visits were made in quest of light, not so much upon the proceedings and the purposes of the Irish "Nationalists,"--with which, on both sides of the Atlantic, I have been tolerably familiar for many years past--as upon the social and economical results in Ireland of the processes of political vivisection to which that country has been so long subjected.
As these results primarily concern Great Britain and British subjects, and as a well-founded and reasonable jealousy exists in Great Britain of American intromission in the affairs of Ireland, it is proper for me to say at the outset, that the condition of Ireland interests me not because I believe, with Cardinal Manning, that upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire, but because I know that America is largely responsible for the actual condition of Ireland, and because the future condition of Ireland, and of the British Empire, must gravely influence the future of my own country.
In common with the vast majority of my countrymen, who come with me of what may now not improperly be called the old American stock--by which I mean the three millions of English-speaking dwellers in the New World, who righteously resented, and successfully resisted, a hundred years ago, the attempt--not of the Crown under which the Colonies held their lands, but of the British Parliament in which they were unrepresented--to take their property without their consent, and apply it to purposes not passed upon by them, I have always felt that the claim of the Irish people to a proper control of matters exclusively Irish was essentially just and reasonable. The measure of that proper control is now, as it always has been, a question not for Americans, but for the people of Great Britain and of Ireland. If Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his associates had succeeded in expelling British authority from Ireland, and in founding an Irish Republic, we should probably have recognised that Republic. Yet an American minister at the Court of St. James's saw no impropriety in advising our Government to refuse a refuge in the United States to the defeated Irish exiles of '98.
It is undoubtedly the opinion of every Irish American who possesses any real influence with the people of his own race in my country, that the rights and liberties of Ireland can only be effectually secured by a complete political separation from Great Britain. Nor can the right of Irish American citizens, holding this opinion, to express their sympathy with Irishmen striving in Ireland to bring about such a result, and with Englishmen or Scotchmen contributing to it in Great Britain, be questioned, any more than the right of Polish citizens of the French Republic to express their sympathy with Poles labouring in Poland for the restoration of Polish nationality. It is perhaps even less open to question than the right of Americans not of Irish race, and of Frenchmen not of Polish race, to express such sympathies; and certainly less open to question than the right of Englishmen or Americans to express their sympathy with Cubans bent on sundering the last link which binds Cuba to Spain, or
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