At a crowded meeting of Home-rulers held last Monday in
the Free-trade Hall, Manchester, a somewhat significant collision occurred between Mr. Parnell and Mr. Mitchell Henry. Mr. Parnell said he wished to see a beginning made of a system of enabling Irish farmers to become the owners of the land they tilled. "A fair offer would be to let a reasonable rent be paid for 30 or 35 years, but at the end of that term, to let the tenant hold his holding without paying rent any farther. If the State wished to compensate the landlords, he saw no objection." Thereupon Mr. Mitchell Henry said that this was not a settle- ment which could be carried out in any country "in which the laws of God and man were observed." The cordial reception of this remark must have staggered Mr. Parnell,. for he again got up, and tried to explain away his calm proposal to confiscate land after the period of thirty or thirty-five years. But in this he did not apparently succeed. Doubtless the collision was one of the circumstances determining Sir George Bowyer to publish the very able and strong comment on Mr. Parnell's policy, which appeared in Friday's Times,. and on which we have elsewhere spoken at more length. If the statesmen and genuine politicians among the Home-rulers would but break off openly from this violent and dangerous leader of theirs, they might carry so much of their plan as would be useful to Ireland, and also perhaps, paralyse the knot of Irish anarchists altogether.
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