.

At the League Hall demonstration on the night of the election, Mr.
Parnell appeared to have caught the high spirit and enthusiasm of his
audience, and in a more powerful address than I had ever before heard
from him, he said:--

Ireland has been knocking at the English door long enough with kid
gloves. I tell the English people to beware, and be wise in time.
Ireland will soon throw off the kid gloves, and she will knock with
a mailed hand.

In this General Election, the Irish vote of Great Britain, in
accordance with the League manifesto, generally went for the Tories, who
came into office, but with a majority so small that they were turned out
at the opening of the Session of 1886, and Mr. Gladstone again came into
power. Seeing that 85 out of the 103 Irish members of Parliament had
been returned pledged to National self-government, he came to the
conclusion to drop coercion, and no longer to attempt to rule the
country against the wishes of the people. He, therefore, introduced his
Home Rule Bill on the 8th of April, 1886, but, failing to carry the
whole of his party with him, he was defeated on the second reading by 30
votes. His defeat at the polls at the General Election which followed
seemed even more crushing than his defeat in Parliament, for, of the
members elected, there was a majority against him of 118.

Mr. Gladstone, looking more closely into the figures of the General
Election, was not disheartened, and as the British public became
educated on the Irish question, bye-election after bye-election proved
triumphantly the truth of his famous saying that the "Flowing Tide" was
carrying the cause of Home Rule on to victory.

Nor were _we_ disheartened, for, counting up the whole of about two and
a half millions of votes given, we found that the Unionists, as the
Tories and Dissentient Liberals called themselves, had a majority of
less than 80,000 votes at the polls. During this time I had become
general organiser of the recognised Irish political organisation of
Great Britain, and upon me chiefly devolved the duty of directing the
work of registration of our Irish voters. A close study of the local
conditions in the various constituencies showed that the mere bringing
up of the neglected Irish vote to something approaching its proper
strength would _alone_ be sufficient to effect the necessary gain. We
threw ourselves into the task--and we succeeded.

I shall always remember with