A History of Ireland.

Volume 2

by Eleanor Hull

1931

XXI.—PARNELL AND THE LAND LEAGUE

During the land agitation another question came to the front. The Home Rule struggle began. Isaac Butt, the son of a Protestant clergyman in the North of Ireland, a Trinity College man and a rising barrister, who had already attained to the distinction of Queen's Counsel when he had been only six years at the Bar, had warned the farmers that if they depended solely on Gladstone and English parties in the House for the attainment of their hopes they were doomed to disappointment. Considering Butt's antecedents, his career had been a remarkable one. He had taken a prominent part in the defence of the Fenian prisoners, and had thus been drawn to inquire into the causes which led to the evolution of such desperate undertakings as those in which his clients had been involved; and into the amnesty movement, which followed immediately, he had thrown himself with all his energies. It was a curious spectacle to see a Protestant clergyman's son defending leaders of revolution against the jibes and severities of an Irish Catholic Solicitor-General, Judge Keogh's management of the cases before him being hardly less offensive in its way, than that of the notorious 'hanging' Judge Norbury after the rebellion of '98.

Butt had become convinced that no assurance of intelligent attention to Irish needs was to be depended upon from the English Parliament. The ignorance of, and consequent indifference to, Irish conditions was too dense, and the vested interests were too strong. Irish grievances, Irish famines, and Irish outrages had become a chronic condition, and they wearied, without interesting, the House. It was difficult for an assembly placed, as the English Parliament was, at a distance, and largely dependent for its information on Members who had private interests to serve, to become aware of the real facts. And members of the Irish Parliamentary party, who, after O'Connell's withdrawal, had shown themselves only too willing to be bought over by the Whigs, had lamentably failed to convince the House of the sincerity of their complaints.

A new party was required, and this party, with Home Rule or the restoration of Irish Parliamentary independence as its final aim, Butt set himself to form. Several of the Protestant gentry, who had not forgotten the days of the independent Parliament, joined him, and even the moderate Catholic gentlemen felt they need not stand aside from so innocuous a form of Home Rule. Certain of the old agitators, who still hoped to work through constitutional means, came forward. It was, however, the Conservatives who took the lead at the inaugural meeting in the Bilton Hotel, Dublin, held on May 10, 1870, which agreed to Butt's motion "That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs." The new association was called "the Home Government Association of Ireland." Thus was the campaign for Home Rule launched.[1]

[1] T. P. O'Connor, The Parnell Movement, pp. 224-225.
The Ballot Act of 1870, passed by Gladstone's first Government, came to their aid, for Ireland had for the first time the opportunity of making her voice heard without fear or favour. The result was remarkable. Four by-elections sent to Parliament John Martin, an old Nationalist of transparent honesty, for Meath, Mitchel Henry for Galway, P. J. Smyth for Westmeath, and Butt himself for Limerick City, all pledged to support Home Rule. At the next General Election of 1874 sixty Home Rulers were returned, out of 103 Members, though in some cases the Catholic clergy actively opposed them.[2] Butt, their leader, was a man of simplicity, kindliness, and very considerable ability. As a Parliamentarian he stood, in his day, next to Gladstone. He sacrificed his profession to his Parliamentary career, and this sacrifice, combined with a temper too easy and benevolent, and a disposition too pleasure-loving, caused the embarrassments which pursued him through life and led him constantly into debt. He had to lead a mixed party. There were young patriots and place-hunters, some old Nationalists like A. M. Sullivan and J. J. O'Kelly, and Conservatives like Colonel King-Harman, who voted for Home Rule with his Irish comrades, but on all English party divisions sided with the Ministry.

[2] See especially the case of John Martin, ibid., p. 226.
It was a heterogeneous party, which could hardly be held together even with Butt's easy handling, and it awaited the coming of a more rigorous leader to weld it into the compact and formidable body which in the time of Parnell and Redmond was to make the Irish party on many occasions the arbiter of the destinies of English parties and the dictators of Irish demands. But it was in Butt's time that the great weapon of obstruction, suggested long before by Gavan Duffy, which was to be wielded with frequent and resistless force by the later Irish party, was formed. On April 22, 1875, when the House was engaged on its accustomed task of passing a Coercion Bill for Ireland, Butt put up Joseph Biggar to speak.[3] "How long do you wish me to speak?" asked Biggar. "A pretty good while," said Butt, who wished to delay the House. Biggar rose; it was five o'clock, and he sat down at nine. By the expedient of reading passages from Blue Books and Acts of Parliament he had managed to occupy four hours of the time of the debate.

[3] Born in Belfast in 1828, and a merchant of that city, he was returned as Member for Cavan in 1874. In 1877 he became a Roman Catholic.
The success of the plan led to its adoption by the Irish party as a regular means of Parliamentary warfare. Parnell first used it effectively in the debate on the new Coercion Bill of 1881, when motion upon motion was made by the Irish Members for the adjournment of the House, one Member succeeding the other through the day and night, without the slightest indication of wearinesss or surrender, in an uninterrupted sitting of forty-one hours, until their campaign was defeated by the introduction of the closure by the Speaker. A memorable contest followed on the reassembling of the House, which ended in the suspension of a large number of the Irish Members for having been guilty of "wilful and deliberate obstruction." Thus the contest for the time was finished, but such scenes were not unusual. They probably tended to make many English Members less averse than they might otherwise have been to the idea of Home Rule as promising to relieve the House of the presence of these obstructionists.

It was while the land agitation was at its height and Home Rule was becoming a question of the first importance that a new and striking figure appeared on the Irish side in the House of Commons. On April 22, 1875, Charles Stewart Parnell took his seat as Member for Co. Meath, in the place of John Martin, who had suddenly died. The slim and quiet young man who unobtrusively entered the House on the day made memorable by Biggar's formidable harangue gave no sign of the power either over Parliament or his own party that he was destined to attain. His own maiden speech was brief and nervous, uttered in a thin, unaggressive voice and with a marked English accent, but it contained the keynote of the position he was about to take up. "Why," he asked, "should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England...? Ireland is not a geographical fragment. She is a nation." Parnell was a Protestant landlord, living on his property at Avondale in Co. Wicklow. Nothing, either in appearance or temperament, could be further removed from the popular ideal of the Irishman as it was embodied in the person of the last "uncrowned king of Ireland," O'Connell. The new claimant for that title was outwardly cold, impassive, and chilling, even to his followers; the outside world he confronted with a careless nonchalance which resented familiarity and seemed to ask for nothing. He was ignorant of public affairs and read few books. Such information as he needed in debate he picked up from others, or got others to look up for him. He quickly mastered the rules of debate, but he had no ambition to become a practised public speaker, and to make an oration was always painful to him. At times it seemed that he went out of his way to show his contempt of popularity, amounting almost to a contempt of humanity. When, in December 1883, it was decided to present him with the magnificent tribute of £40,000 collected among his admirers and friends his only remark was: "Is it made payable to order and crossed?" No words of thanks or sign of gratitude.[4]

[4] R. Barry O'Brien, Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 11, 28.
While mass meetings which he was to address were waiting in Ireland for his appearance he might be found watching for the arrival of Mrs. O'Shea at some railway station in London or reading quietly in her room at Eltham. "I found out early in political life," he would say, "that they think I'm much more wonderful when I do nothing than when I'm working hard."[5] When the first of the forged incriminating letters in The Times was shown to him long after the rest of the London world had read it and come to the hasty conclusion that Home Rule had received its deathblow, all he remarked after looking at it carefully was: "I did not make an s like that since 1878." No wonder that his friends thought that if he were going to treat the letter in that way in the House there was not an Englishman but would believe that he had written it. On all critical occasions in his life this same impassive attitude distressed his supporters and baulked his enemies.

[5] Katherine O'Shea (Mrs. C. S. Parnell), Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 199.
It is no doubt true that Parnell looked even on the men of his own party rather as counters in the political game he had sat down to play than as friends and confidants. In response to a plea from Mrs. O'Shea that "after all they were human beings" he would answer characteristically, "In politics, as in war, there are no men, only weapons."[6] When his will was thwarted he would fling out of the party even a man who had been useful to him in former days, saying, "While I am leader they are my tools, or they go."[7] A man so autocratic made few personal friends and had, among his party, no confidants. He held himself aloof, and his very aloofness surrounded him with that attraction which an impenetrable mystery always provokes. But the world was not wrong in believing that there were fires smouldering beneath the impassive exterior, and that he was a man of strong feeling. Parnell was in truth a man of two passions, which absorbed, controlled, and dominated his life. For the attainment of both of these aims he was ready to employ all means, lawful and unlawful; to go through any suffering; and to sacrifice ruthlessly both himself and others.

[6] Ibid,, ii., 240.
[7] Ibid., 243-244.
The passion which controlled his private life was his love for Mrs. O'Shea, who shortly before his death became his wife; the passion of his public life was the desire to lift Ireland out of the rut of hopeless postponements of relief and to see her set on the paths of national progress and prosperity. His concern for his country began, as it would appear, from the epoch of the executions of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, "the Manchester Martyrs," but it was more probably instilled into the boy at an earlier date by his mother, who was a strong Nationalist, and by his sisters, Anna and Fanny Parnell, the founders of the Ladies' Land League, which he suppressed in 1882, denouncing its criminality and wild extravagance and saying that it had taken the country out of his hands. He had in his early days no intention of taking up a political career. He was interested in his property in Wicklow, busied in investigating its mineral resources, and preparing to take a course in geology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, when his life as an Irish squireen was changed by a halfhearted effort to secure a seat in Parliament.

The bent of Parnell's mind was scientific, and all through his life he fell back on engineering and chemistry as his absorbing hobbies. His interest in his crucibles was so great that even on the morning of The Times attack he put off reading the paper for two hours while he completed some chemical work and jotted down results. It was a chance remark dropped at the dinner-table of his sister, Mrs Dickenson, that led Parnell to think of entering Parliament, but to his intimates he appeared likely to prove a hopeless failure in a political career. He struck them as wanting both in political knowledge and capacity. When Parnell entered Parliament Butt was the undisputed leader of the Irish party; Bill after Bill in reference to Ireland was introduced, but none of them got through. To Parnell it appeared a terrible waste of time; he despised all the talking which ended in nothing. Slowly he set himself to form a party, strictly disciplined, entirely dependent on himself, and answering to his every call. His policy outside the House and within it was practically the same; in the House he obstructed, not special Bills, but all Bills and every detail of business.

The lesson he had learned from Biggar on the day when he entered the House he perfected into a fine art. The House would not carry Irish Bills; he therefore determined that his lieutenants should talk out every Bill presented; his object being to throw the whole machinery of Parliament out of gear. By 1877 he had organized the party, and Butt, who disapproved of such treatment of the Parliamentary institutions which he reverenced, withdrew and was formally deposed from the leadership of the Home Rule party, William Shaw being elected in his place in 1879. But the feeling that in Parliament the government of England was being challenged and thwarted had a great effect in Ireland, where Davitt was lecturing on a peasant proprietary. The "sheer tenacity" of Parnell, who carried war into the very citadel of the "enemy," struck them as a new departure. He was busy organizing the Land League, and he was in touch with the Fenians, though he never became one of that body.

There was no organization that he would not have used if he thought it would have promoted the ends he had in view, and the New Fenian movement was demanding separation from England and the establishment of peasant proprietorship. In the latter proposal Parnell agreed, and at a Land League meeting at Westport in 1879 he called on the farmers and peasants to "show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and land." Those landlords that resisted were to be boycotted mercilessly. This was Parnell's land policy. He stood in a peculiar position, leaning on the one hand on the Fenians and the Clan-na-Gael, their American associates, but on the other hand still determined to employ Parliamentary methods. He won the hearts of the rank and file of these revolutionary bodies, whose earnestness and fearlessness he admired, by "walking on the verge of treason-felony,"[8] though he held the violent spirits back until he had once more given constitutional opposition a trial. Two new advances in position had been more clearly formulated since Parnell took up the reins—Irish peasant-ownership and separation from England.

[8] R. Barry O'Brien, Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 29.
In April 1880 came the general election which placed Gladstone in power, with Forster as Chief Secretary and Lord Cowper as Viceroy of Ireland. Parnell was returned for three constituencies and chose to sit for Cork City. He was also elected leader of the Nationalist party, and, in Gladstone's words, there rushed upon him like a flood a social revolution with the Land League for its organ in Ireland and Parnell's party as its organ in Parliament. Agrarian agitation and Parliamentary obstruction were to inarch hand in hand. Gladstone explained to the Queen that the state of Ireland was menacing, and Forster, whom Gladstone was later to describe as "a very impracticable man placed in a position of great responsibility," introduced a Coercion Bill which practically enabled the Viceroy to lock up anyone he pleased and for as long as he pleased. The Land League was increasing in power every day, and the country was in a state of violent agitation. Forster professed to believe that if the "village tyrants" who were committing outrages were arrested the disorder would stop, while Parnell called on the Government to cure wrongs and stop convictions, if they wished crime to disappear.

With the League behind him he was ready to defy the House. After a continuous obstruction of several days the closure was applied by the Speaker, and the Bill passed. The Coercion Bill was followed by the Land Bill of 1881, of which we have already spoken. It had as its basis the long-debated "Three F's." It was a good Bill, and it passed by a majority of two to one. But Parnell continued the agitation, and used all his authority to keep the tenants from seeking to have their rents fixed by the Land Commission. "He desired," Gladstone said, "to spread the plague, not to stop it." He made defiant speeches at Maryborough and Wexford, and on October 12 the Cabinet decided on his arrest. The step was taken largely to prevent his interference with the working of the Act and to give it a fair chance of quieting the country, and, as such, it seems to have been justified. The Land League had to advance or retire, and Parnell was determined to keep it alive for further efforts. He was detained with other political prisoners for six months in a light confinement at Kilmainham, and Ireland became once more a prey to violence and disorder. Agrarian outrages increased, and 'moonlighting,' raids terrified peaceable inhabitants. The "No-Rent" campaign was actively at work, and Parnell's own tenants were "acting strictly up to it."[9]

[9] Ibid., i, 335.
A new turn was now given to events. It was decided to release Parnell and the "suspects," to recall Forster, and to send in his place Lord Frederick Cavendish, a high-minded man and good friend to Ireland. Parnell expressed his readiness to advise the tenants to settle with the landlords, to withdraw the "No-Rent" manifesto, and to discourage outrages, if the Government would make a favourable settlement of the question of arrears. In Forster's words he offered "that the conspiracy that had been used to get up boycotting and outrages should be put down by the same means," and a union made with the Liberal party on certain conditions respecting an arrears settlement. "If all England," he added, "cannot govern the Hon. Member for Cork, then let us acknowledge that he is the greatest power in all Ireland to-day." Gladstone found Parnell's letter with these proposals "the most extraordinary he had ever read," and felt highly gratified. The Viceroy saw matters in another light, and resigned; on May 2, 1882, Parnell, O'Kelly, and Dillon walked out of prison, and a few days later, while Forster was speaking against the policy of his release, Parnell, amid deafening cheers, resumed his place in the House. It seemed for the moment that what came to be called "the Kilmainham Treaty" between Gladstone and Parnell might be the beginning of better things, when one of those thunderclaps occurred which have so often darkened the skies of Ireland on critical occasions. The news was flashed round the world that on the very day when the new Lord-Lieutenant, Earl Spencer, had made his state entry into Dublin the new Chief Secretary and his Under-Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, walking out to the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, were set on by a band of assassins from the "Invincibles" and stabbed to death.

The horror that fell on the whole community on that day will never be forgotten in this generation. The assassins, as it turned out afterwards, did not even recognize Lord Frederick Cavendish; they aimed at killing Burke. Parnell, for once, was shaken out of his self-command; he was prostrated alike by the crime and by the effect it must have on his campaign. The forces of evil with which he had dallied had risen against him to destroy the work on which his heart was set. He offered to resign, and made a straightforward speech in the House condemning the murders, while the Government reverted to their Crimes legislation. But Ministers kept their word about the Arrears Bill; Parnell, too, kept his, and slowed down agitation. Henceforth he wished solely to advance Home Rule, for which purpose he established the National League, though keeping in the background the ultimate aim of a peasant proprietary of land. He became more moderate, and more in horror of anarchy, though he felt the result of moderation in the loss of the more violent of his supporters; Davitt and Dillon disapproved his course, and Brennan and Egan denounced his "moderation." Parnell's inexorable will and dauntless courage were sorely tried, but he held his party together by his commanding personality and at moments by an irresistible charm. He refused, however, to take any active part in the "Plan of Campaign" launched by William O'Brien for the purpose of keeping alive agitation and forcing the landlords to accept what the tenants considered a fair rent, and for a time he practically retired from public life.

He was ill and disheartened, and while at Kilmainham he had come to the conclusion that "everything connected with the Land League movement was hollow and wanting in solidity."[10] Lord Spencer had a hard task to face when he reached Dublin, and his régime was fiercely attacked. Random arrests, trials for sedition, and packed juries gave plenty of fuel for the Land League campaign; it was gravely questioned whether several of the executed men were the real culprits. Meanwhile, dynamite plots, boldly supported by the Irish World and financed from America, spread from Ireland to England, where arms and dynamite factories were discovered and attempts made to blow up public buildings in the Metropolis. There was an epidemic of outrages, and the social fabric in Ireland seemed to rock. The country appeared to be a society on the eve of dissolution. Landlords and sheriffs alike were intimidated. Gladstone believed that Parnell was the one restraining influence which kept down outrage, and his Cabinet was convinced that he "was sincerely anxious for the pacification of Ireland."[11] Parnell was engaged in welding into a compact body his adherents in the Commons, with the intention of making the independent Nationalist party the arbiter of the fate of the two opposed English parties and forcing from them the reforms he demanded. The 1885 election was to be fought on new lines, for Gladstone's Reform Act of 1884 had added some 500,000 electors, largely Home Rulers, to the poll.

[10] Katherine O'Shea, Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 235-236.
[11] Morley, Life of Gladstone, iii, 70.
Ever since his release from Kilmainham the Irish leader had been coquetting with various members of the Tory party.

Lord Randolph Churchill repudiated the policy of coercion and foreshadowed a change of policy. Chamberlain was strongly in favour of a large measure of local government for Ireland, with a central council in Dublin. Above all, Lord Carnarvon, the Viceroy, appeared sincerely attached to the plan of Home Rule, but feared that he would find difficulties with his colleagues in the Cabinet. Negotiations were set on foot, and were carried on, when not directly with the Irish leader, by means of intermediaries, among them being Captain O'Shea with Chamberlain and Mrs. O'Shea with Gladstone, Parnell took the field and raised the banner of Home Rule, declaring that he had only one plank, Legislative Independence. But his speeches met with a united note of hostility from the Tory Press, and the party wavered under the threat of a strong adverse vote at the coming election. As they cooled, Gladstone became more propitious, and Parnell's promise that "Whigs and Tories would be seen vying with each other to settle the Irish question" was actually becoming true. The Liberals came in by a majority of eighty-two, and Parnell had behind him a solid party of eighty-six Home Rulers, which he could use to force the situation on either side.[12]

[12] The Elections sent 333 Liberals, 251 Tories, and 86 Parnellites to Parliament.
English parties were reduced to a state of impotence, and Parnell proposed to keep them so till the question of Home Rule was settled. He was at this moment one of the most powerful and most unpopular men in England. But he remained convinced that no Government would do more for Ireland than it was forced to do. In 1885 Lord Salisbury accepted office with reluctance, not only because of serious differences within his own party, but because of the uncertainty of the Irish vote. His fears were realized; a Coercion Bill was introduced and within a month the Government was defeated on an amendment of Jesse Collings on an Agricultural Bill, and Gladstone again took office. But the diversity of views in the Cabinet on the Irish question at once came to the front, and Chamberlain, who remained firm to his plan for local government, withdrew, carrying with him Trevelyan and Sir Charles Dilke. The first business was to draft a Government of Ireland Bill. A year before, when Lord Hartington expressed his dissent from Gladstone's then half-formed plans, the elder man had prophesied that in the end there would have to be given "at least what they [Chamberlain and Dilke] recommend."

But the success of the Home Rule party at the polls had led the Nationalists "to raise their terms," and any measure of local government, however extended, had now no chance of being accepted. Gladstone's present policy shaped itself into two measures, a Home Rule Bill establishing a domestic legislature to deal with Irish affairs, and a Land Purchase Bill for buying out the landlords and creating a peasant proprietary, but the latter Bill was quickly dropped. Parnell fought for good financial terms, and by his close, tenacious mastery of details won the approval of the greatest financier of his time. "He never slurred over difficulties, nor tried to pretend that rough was smooth...Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace...But he knew what he wanted."[13] The chief point of antagonism was the question of the retention or exclusion of Irish Members from Westminster, the limits of their interference, and what branches of legislation were to be excluded from the purview of the Irish Parliament; but the Bill was hammered into shape, and introduced in a crowded House on April 8, 1886. The debate was long, serious, and brilliant. Lord Hartington and Chamberlain opposed the Bill along with John Bright, who had many times in the past spoken in favour of Irish claims. Lord Salisbury made an alarmist speech, and Chamberlain discussed federation.

[13] Morley, Life of Gladstone, iii, 304-305.
Every individual in the three kingdoms seemed to feel himself effected by the Bill, and fought for or against it. Some accepted the principle of the Bill, but demurred upon detail, but, on the whole, it was discovered that a widespread desire existed throughout the country to give the Irish people greater control over their own affairs. Parnell's speeches were masterly, grave, and responsible, and were said by a competent judge "to make even able disputants on either side look little better than amateurs."[14] He hesitated over the exclusion of customs and excise from the control of the Irish Parliament and at the contribution of £3,344,000 to the Imperial Exchequer, but on May 10, he said that he believed the Irish people would accept the measure as a final settlement. Gladstone, then seventy-six years of age, pleaded with passion and oratory for his Bill. Yet when the division was taken the Bill was lost by thirty votes, and Gladstone dissolved Parliament. A Unionist majority of no was declared at the polls, and Gladstone resigned.

[14] Ibid., iii, 337. For a summary of the Bill, see ibid., iii, 559, Appendix.
On March 7, 1887, the first of the letters on "Parnellism and Crime" appeared in The Times. Into that sordid attempt to incriminate Parnell by the use of forged letters, it is unnecessary to go. Pigott, who had been paid to write them shot himself after the trial. The case dragged on for months before a Special Commission, but though it threw much light on the working of secret societies in Ireland it failed to convict Parnell of complicity.[15] On his acquittal he was received in the House with a great ovation, every member of the assembly rising and cheering himself hoarse. But the moment of triumph was brief. On December 24, 1889, the long-expected blow fell, and Captain O'Shea filed a petition for divorce on the ground of Parnell's adultery with his wife. A divorce was granted, and Parnell married Mrs. O'Shea, but the matter was taken up strenuously by different sections of the public, and Gladstone wrote a letter saying that he would retire from the leadership of the Liberal party if Parnell did not retire. Parnell had just been re-elected leader of the Nationalist party, but Gladstone's letter split the party, and he was called upon to resign. A short time later Parnell was no more. He died at Brighton on October 6, 1891.

[15] Although the Special Commission which tried Parnell failed to convict him of complicity in crime or responsibility for overt illegal acts, the remarkable book published by Patrick P. Tynan, who was known as "Number One," called The Irish National Invincibles and their Times (1894), shows that he considered such illegal organizations as a necessary part of the Land League policy, and was quite prepared to use them as occasion arose. "Number One" was the commanding officer of the military Invincibles in Dublin City. The organization sprang into existence immediately after the suppression of the Land League and was "the creation of the Parnellite Irish Government." "It must be distinctly understood that the creation of this new and important Irish organization, or rather the transferring of the braver and more determined members of the Land League into the National Invincibles, was not the work of subordinates in the Parnellite ranks. It was the action of those who governed the movement...In a word, the Invincibles sprang into existence by order of the Parnellite Government of Ireland, elected by the Irish nation" (p. 428). Again (on p. 439) he says: "This history cannot be too emphatic in stating that the Parnellism of that epoch and the Invincibles were one and the same in actual fact, and the policy of this active movement, its authority, its armament (such as it was) sprang from the organised ranks of 'legal agitation.'" Parnell himself, speaking in America in 1880, had asserted the necessity of having both a constitutional and an illegal arm in any revolutionary movement in Ireland; it should use the constitutional weapon for its own purposes, but take advantage of its secret organization when occasion offered (p. 137). It seems clear, therefore, that Parnell cannot be acquitted of having organized and permitted criminal acts when it suited the purpose of his policy. [End of Note 15.]
It is difficult to define the secret of Parnell's influence over his followers. He had none of the arts of popularity, neither oratory, wit, or subservience to the demands of his audience. Often, when they expected to be roused, his manner and words chilled them; he met his admirers with frigidity when they looked for cordiality, and, in later life, in proportion as the veteran statesman who fought his battles glowed with enthusiasm, Parnell displayed an unsympathetic and almost cynical manner. English society bored him, and he showed the contempt he felt for it. Yet he was capable of rousing large Irish audiences to a pitch of excitement which only O'Connell had been able to equal, and the ablest men of the day felt and acknowledged his power. Gladstone admired his business-like way of approaching great questions and his clear head for finance. He ascribed much of his influence to the fact that Parnell always said exactly what he meant and no more, and Parnell, in return, recognized alone in Gladstone a force of will and a Parliamentary resource equal to and even surpassing his own. His great and rare gift of dominating men and controlling them Gavan Duffy ascribes to his intense individuality, and Chamberlain to his tenacity of purpose, which made him indifferent to anything which stood in the way of the aim he had in view. Ireland, which is quick to recognize sincere devotion to her interests, saw in him a man solely bent on serving her cause; and she repaid him by an unquestioning obedience. Men understood his purpose who disapproved his methods, and they learned by experience that his judgment in tactics seldom failed. Mrs. O'Shea, seeing him from another angle, compared him to a volcano under a sheet of snow.

END OF CHAPTER XXI