the most varied standards and opinions the greatness of
Parnell as the leader of a nation is universally conceded. The
question may be asked: But what did Parnell actually accomplish to
entitle him to this distinction? I will attempt briefly to summarise
his achievements. He found a nation of serfs, and if he did not
actually make a nation of freemen of them he set them on the high road
to freedom, he gave them a measure of their power when united and
disciplined, and he taught them how to resist and combat the
arrogance, the greed and the inbred cruelty of landlordism. He struck
at England through its most vulnerable point--through its Irish
garrison, with its cohorts of unscrupulous mercenaries and hangers-on.
He struck at it in the very citadel of its own vaunted liberties--in
the Parliament whose prestige was its proudest possession and which he
made it his aim to shatter, to ridicule and to destroy. He converted
an Irish Party of complaisant time-servers, Whigs and office-seekers
into a Party of irreproachable incorruptibility, unbreakable unity,
iron discipline and a magnificently disinterested patriotism. He
formulated the demand for Irish nationhood with clearness and
precision. He knew how to bargain with the wiliest and subtlest
statesman of his age, and great and powerful as Gladstone was he met
in Parnell a man equally conscious of his own strength and equally
tenacious of his principles. In fact, on every encounter the ultimate
advantage rested with Parnell. He won on the Land Question, he won on
the labourer's demands, he won on the Home Rule issue and he showed
what a potent weapon the balance of power could be in the hands of a
capable and determined Irish leader.

Not alone did he create an impregnable Irish Party; he established a
united Irish race throughout the world. His sway was acknowledged with
the same implicit confidence among the exiled Irish in America and
Australia as it was by the home-folk in Ireland. He was the great
cementing influence of an Irish solidarity such as was never before
attempted or realised. He did a great deal to arrest the outflow of
the nation's best blood by emigration, and, if he had no strong or
striking policy on matters educational and industrial, he gave manhood
to the people, he developed character in them, he gave them security
in their lands and homes, and, if the unhappy cataclysm of his later
days had not be-fallen, he would unquestionably have given them a
m