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 admitted by the best
informed authorities that Mr. Sheridan had no responsibility, was
driving Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates into disavowals of
the extreme men of their connection, which, but for Mr. Sheridan's
coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them,
might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all
concerned.[5] But whatever "Home Rule" may or may not mean, I went to
Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase,
which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you
encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social
and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the
revolutionary forces which are now at work in that country.

I have watched the development of these forces too long and too closely
to be under any illusion as to the real importance relatively with them
of the so-called "Parliamentary" action of the Irish Nationalists.

II.

The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my
return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebra