f
their own; the other, that it was the progeny of distress and wrong, that
the league had rather controlled than kindled its ferocity, and that crime
and outrage were due to local animosities for which neither league nor
parliamentary leaders were answerable.

On the forty-fourth day (February 5) came a lurid glimpse from across the
Atlantic. The Irish emigration had carried with it to America the deadly
passion for the secret society. A spy was produced, not an Irishman this
time for a wonder, but an Englishman. He had been for eight-and-twenty
years in the United States, and for more than twenty of them he had been
in the pay of Scotland Yard, a military spy, as he put it, in the service
of his country. There is no charge against him that he belonged to that
foul species who provoke others to crime and then for a bribe betray them.
He swore an oath of secrecy to his confederates in the camps of the
Clan-na-Gael, and then he broke his oath by nearly every post that went
from New York to London. It is not a nice trade, but then the dynamiter's
is not a nice trade either.(255) The man had risen high in the secret
brotherhood. Such an existence demanded nerves of steel; a moment of
forgetfulness, an accident with a letter, the slip of a phrase in the two
parts that he was playing, would have doomed him in the twinkling of an
eye. He now stood a rigorous cross-examination like iron. There is no
reason to think that he told lies. He was perhaps a good deal less trusted
than he thought, for he does not appear on any occasion to have forewarned
the police at home of any of the dynamite attempts that four or five years
earlier had startled the English capital. The pith of his week's evidence
was his account of an interview between himself and Mr. Parnell in the
corridors of the House of Commons in April 1881. In this interview, Mr.
Parnell, he said, expressed his desire to bring the Fenians in Ireland
into line with his own constitutional movement, and to that end requested
the spy to invite a notorious leader of the physical force party in
America to come over to Ireland, to arrange a harmonious understanding.
Mr. Parnell had no recollection of the interview, (M145) though he thought
it very possible that an interview might have taken place. It was
undoubtedly odd that the spy having once got his line over so big a fish,
should never afterwards have made any attempt to draw him on. The judges,
however, found upon a review of