ng
member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that
movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or
policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded
them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction,
which there is reason to suppose was suggested to him by a friend who
had studied the Congressional proceedings of the United States, the
native country of his mother, and especially the tactics which had
enabled Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania, the leader of the Democratic
minority in the House of Representatives, to check the so-called "Civil
Rights Bill," sent down by the Senate to that House, during a continuous
session of forty-six hours and a half, with no fewer than seventy-seven
calls of the house, in the month of January 1875, some time before Mr.
Parnell first took his seat in the House of Commons.

When Mr. Parnell, early in 1878, thanks to this system, had ousted Mr.
Butt, and got himself elected as President of the Irish "Home Rule
Confederation," he found himself, as an Irish friend of mine wrote to me
at the time, in an awkward position. He had command of the "Home Rule"
members at Westminster, but he had no notion what to do with them, and
neither they nor he could see anyway open to securing a permanent hold
upon the Irish voters. Three bad harvests in succession had thrown the
Irish tenants into a state which disinclined them to make sacrifices
for any sentimental policy, but prepared them to lend their ears eagerly
to Michael Davitt, when, on his return from the United States in the
early spring of 1879, he proclaimed anew, at Irishtown in his native
county of Mayo, the gospel of 1848 giving the land of Ireland to the
people of Ireland. Clearly Mr. Davitt held the winning card. As he
frankly put the case to a special correspondent, whom I sent to see him,
and whose report I published in New York, he saw that "the only issue
upon which Home Rulers, Nationalists, Obstructionists, and each and
every shade of opinion existing in Ireland could be united was the Land
Question," and of that question he took control. Naturally enough, Mr.
Parnell, himself a landowner under the English settlement, shrank at
first from committing himself and his fortunes to the leadership of Mr.
Davitt. But no choice was really left him, and there is reason to
believe that a decision was made easier to him by a then inchoate
undertaking that he should be p