ns of
the times now shows it to be. Mr. Parnell and the National League are
really nothing but the mask of Mr. Davitt and the Land League. Mr.
Forster knew what he was about when he proclaimed the Land League in
October 1881, six months or more after he had arrested and locked up Mr.
Davitt in Portland prison. This was shown by the foolish No-Rent
manifesto which Mr. Parnell and his associates issued from Kilmainham
shortly after their incarceration, and without the counsel or consent at
that time of Mr. Davitt--a manifesto which the Archbishop of Cashel,
despite his early sympathies and connection with the agrarian agitation
of 1848, found it expedient promptly to disavow. It would have been
still more clearly shown had not Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster parted
company under the restiveness of Mr. Gladstone's Radical followers, and
the pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882. But
after the withdrawal of Mr. Forster, and the release of Mr. Davitt, the
English lawyers and politicians who led Lord Spencer and Sir George
Trevelyan into allowing the Land League to be revived under the
transparent alias of the National League, gave Mr. Davitt an
opportunity, of which he promptly availed himself, to regain the ground
lost by the blundering of the men of Kilmainham. From that time forth I
have always regarded him as the soul of the Irish agitation, of the war
against "landlordism" (which is incidentally, of course, a war against
the English influence in Ireland), and of the movement towards Irish
independence. Whether the agitation, the war, and the movement have gone
entirely in accordance with his views and wishes is quite another
matter.

I have too good an opinion of his capacity to believe that they have;
and when the secret history of the Chicago Convention comes to be
written, I expect to find such confirmation therein of my notions on
this subject as I could neither ask nor, if I asked, could expect to get
from him.

Meanwhile the manliness and courage of the man must always command for
him the respect, not to say the admiration, even of those who most
sternly condemn his course and oppose his policy.

Born the child of an evicted tenant, in the times when an eviction meant
such misery and suffering as are seldom, if ever, now caused by the
process--bred and maimed for life in an English factory--captured when
hardly more than a lad in Captain M'Cafferty's daring attempt to seize
Chester Castl