A. very hitter letter on the Anti-Parnellito revolt has been
written by .Miss Anna Parnell to the Freeman's Journal, from which the larger part of it was transferred to the Times of this day week. She proposes a revival de novo of the Home- rule Association, on the ground that the National League and the Irish Parliamentary Party are no longer to be trusted. If the approbation of any person whatever,—Mr. Gladstone, for example,—were necessary to the choice of an effective Chairman by the Parliamentary Party, it was their business to provide for that requirement at the proper time, and before the name of the Chairman had been selected. If they did not try to get that approbation at the proper time, they showed incompetence ; and if they did try and did not succeed, they showed incompetence. " Some say that, in the first instance, they did not know what they wero doing, and say it so pathetically as to make us hope that in future they will take their nurses with them when they go out." But " people who do not know what they are doing once, may not know any better another time. A tender instinct, say for Mr. Gladstone, of whom the Irish Members seem very fond, may beguile them again." " If they did not know what a man whose whole political career had been under their own observation would do, how are they to know, as they say they do, what Mr. Gladstone, who was old and crafty when most of them were in long clothes, would do P" And so Miss Anna Parnell goes on, in the same cold, satirical, and not very refined vein, to prove the untrustworthiness of the Anti-Parnellites. No doubt she proves her case, and -could equally well, as she hints, have proved the thorough untrustworthiness of " the other side ; " but that, of course, as she herself suggests, is not her business. "The views of the majority," she holds, are always most in need of criticism.
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