er, on the
whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of
the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the
electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield's dissolution of
Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do
what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this
visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally
transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his
arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical
combination between the advocates of "the land for the people" on both
sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82,
publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question,
while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by
Mr. Gladstone's Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his
ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while
travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under
"suspicion" in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster's officers, and was
arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr.
Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by
the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to
impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it
was demonstrated by the incarceration of Mr. Parnell in Kilmainham, the
disavowal, under pressure, of the no-rent manifesto by Archbishop Croke,
and the suppression of the Land League. In sequestrating Mr. Davitt, Mr.
Forster, as was shown by the extraordinary scenes which in the House of
Commons followed his arrest, had struck at the core of the revolution,
and had the Irish Secretary not been deserted by Mr. Gladstone, under
influences which originated at Kilmainham, and were reinforced by the
pressure of the United States Government in the spring of 1882, history
might have had a very different tale to tell of the last six years in
Ireland and in Great Britain.[6]

V.

It was after the return of Mr. George from Ireland to New York in 1882
that the first black point appeared on the horizon, of the conflict,
inevitable in the nature of things, between the social revolution and
the Catholic Church, which assumed such serious proportions two years
ago in America, and which is