Ireland Under Coercion - vol. 1 | Page 8

it than to take an active part in dethroning the
Czar of all the Russias. The lesson which Washington administered to
Citizen Genet, when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic
undertook to "boom" the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at
Charleston, has governed the foreign relations of the United States ever
since, and it is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every
public servant of the Republic.
I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all
my observations and comments have been made from an American, not
from a British or an Irish point of view. How or by whom Ireland shall
be governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland
may affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and
thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between
the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect
the future of my country. This being my point of view, it will be
apparent, I think, that I have at least laboured under no temptation to
see things otherwise than as they were, or to state things otherwise than
as I saw them.
With Arthur Young, who more clearly than any other man of his time
saw the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded
French Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think "the
application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility
in the human mind:" and it will be found that in this book I have done
little more than set down, as fully and clearly as I could, what I actually
saw and heard in Ireland. My method has been as simple as my object.
During each day as occasion served, and always at night, I made

stenographic notes of whatever had attracted my attention or engaged
my interest. As I had no case to make for or against any political party
or any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small,
and people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by
preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of
whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes,
only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of
whatever they were to record. These notes I have subsequently written
out in the spirit in which I made them, in all cases taking what pains I
could to verify statements of facts, and in many cases, where it seemed
desirable or necessary, submitting the proofs of the pages as finally
printed to the persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.
I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed
upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to read
the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what I
heard.
I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may
be better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which
these conclusions have been drawn. Such as they are, I have put them
into a few pages at the end of the book.
It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject
of Home Rule for Ireland. Until it shall be ascertained what "Home
Rule for Ireland" means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside
the domain of my inquiries. "Home Rule for Ireland" is not now a
plan--nor so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of
little importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland,
however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my
own country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic.
It may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain's imperialist
scheme of four Provincial Councils--which recalls the outlines of a
system once established with success in New Zealand--to that absolute
and complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland
from the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been
the aim of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the

last twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the "Home Rule"
party in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to
have pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to
impede. On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary
evidence was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr.
Sheridan, at a time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited
by those murders in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now