m side by side with the
National Question and we will support you. See Kickham." What had Parnell,
a landowner and a haughty man, to do with the peasant or the peasant's
grievance? And he was indeed so ignorant of both that he asked Kickham,
novelist and Fenian leader, if he thought the people would take up a land
agitation, and Kickham answered:--"I am only afraid they would go to the
Gates of Hell for it;" and O'Leary's comment was, "and so they have."

And so was founded an agitation where some men pretended to national
passion for the land's sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation's
sake; some men to both for their own advancement, and this agitation at
the time I write of had but old men to serve it, who found themselves
after years of labour, some after years of imprisonment, derided for
unscrupulous rascals. Unscrupulous they certainly were, for they had
grown up amid make-believe, and now because their practical grievance was
too near settlement to blind and to excite, their make-believe was visible
to all. They were as eloquent as ever, they had never indeed shared
anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions
inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation
that had turned against all oratory. I recall to my memory a member of
Parliament who had fought for Parnell's policy after Parnell's death, and
much against his own interest, who refused to attend a meeting my friends
had summoned at the declaration of the Boer War, because he thought
"England was in the right," and yet a week later when the Dublin mob had
taken the matter up, advised Irish soldiers to shoot their officers and
join President Kruger. I recall another and more distinguished politician
who supported the Anti-Parnellite Party in his declining years, and in his
vigorous years had raked up some scandal about some Colonial Governor. A
friend of mine, after advising that Governor's son to write his father's
life, had remembered the scandal and called in her alarm upon the
politician; "I do beseech you," he had said and with the greatest
earnestness, "to pay no attention whatever to anything I may have said
during an election."

Certain of these men, all public prepossessions laid aside, were excellent
talkers, genial and friendly men, with memories enriched by country
humour, and much half sentimental, half practical philosophy, and at
moments by poetical feeling that was not all an affec