MR. STEPHEN GWYNN AND MR. PATRICK FORD.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.1 Sin,—I have been considering bow to reply to the letters about Mr. Patrick Ford, and have decided to leave the expression of my very sincere feelings in this matter to a couple of quotations from Mr. William O'Brien's "Recollec- tions," published in 1905. It is with real pleasure that I find myself able to adopt unreservedly his utterances on a matter where he speaks with so much authority. Mr. O'Brien says :— "It is only outbursts of irreconcilability in England's own Press and Parliament that give the Irish-American revolutionists their force. Nay Mr. Ford himself, and his journal, ever since Glad- stone proved the possibility of reconciling Irish National aspira- tions with the British connection, have been the most consistent advocates of a reasonable, international settlement, upon which Gladstonian statesmanship could have counted in its most sanguine dreams."
Again :—
" His excesses were those on which England has been willing to turn a not indulgent eye in the case of a Mazzini or a Stepniak, or an enslaved Italy or an enslaved Russia. ff he truth is, that any one of half-a-dozen English journals of eminence it would be easy to name has done more to create blind prejudice and bad blood between the two races than the Irish World in its bitterest hour. It will perhaps astonish Englishmen still more to be told that, next to Parnell and Gladstone, they owe to Patrick Ford more than to any other living man the conversion of an entire Irish-American world of enemies to a spirit of friendliness of which the vote of 'the predominant partner' herself alone forbade the consummation."
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