Every statement in it will probably be challenged, but the

impression it leaves on the reader is that it is the work of a

perfectly honest man. "I write," he tells us, "as a Nationalist who maintains the whole of the rights of my country " ; but he holds that there are true and false ways of maintaining

rights, and he recalls; for the reader's satisfaction as well as for his own, that he has paid dearly for acting on this dis- tinction. "In the height of my political influence and popularity in Ireland I deliberately rejected that position rather than accept the programme of the Land League and the dishonour of American money. I abandoned the double distinction to advisers and allies of Ministers of the Crown."

There is so much that calls for attention in these substan- tial volumes that the work of selection is difficult as well as necessary. There can be no question, however, with what to begin. To understand the later history of the Home-rule agitation it is essential to note the changes wrought in it by the substitution of Parnell for Butt as its leader. Home- rule, as Butt understood it, was meant to unite Irishmen ; as Parnell understood it, it aimed at setting one class of Irish- men against another. The Home-Rule Conference of 1873 was willing to incorporate in the Federal Constitution " articles supplying the amplest guarantees that no change shall be made by that [the Irish] Parliament in the present settlement of property in Ireland "; Parnell thought to obtain Home-rule by proclaiming a social war. The cause was to become popular, not on its merits, but by its identification

with an organisation which plundered every landlord in Ireland by way of correcting the harsh acts of a few of their number. Butt's object was to restore the Constitution of Ireland, with its Houses of Lords and Commons, as it existed down to 1800. There was a time when Parnell approved this plan, at all events in theory. As late as 1885 he said at Cork "We cannot ask for less than the restitution of Grattan's

Parliament We cannot under the British Constitution ask for more than the restitution of Grattan's Parliament." But when he found that Mr. Gladstone had different views he hastened to make them his own, thus throwing overboard, in Mr. O'Donnell's opinion, all that made Home-rule worth striving for. Within a twelvemonth of his speech at Cork " Parnell was flinging the old Irish Parliament into the lumber-room," and accepting " as much local government for Irishmen as the Imperial Parliament thought safe for Ireland." It is interesting to compare the Home-rule which Parnell offered with the old-fashioned Home-ruler's Confession of Faith as stated by Mr. O'Donnell. " We acknowledge," says the earlier champion, "no supremacy of any Imperial Parlia- ment in the Irish nation. Ireland is not one of the parts of the country.' It is a nation co-equal with England in historic right, sovereign autonomy, and racial pride " :—

" It was perfectly clear to us that we wanted to restore the Irish Constitution ; that no single Chamber could possibly be the Parliament of Grattan, or could possibly be any guarantee to the interests of property, and Conservatism ; and that on the other band the existence of a House of Lords, possessed of all the rights

of the English Chamber, was the best possible seenrity against spoliatory legislation. It might occasionally be a clog upon some real reform. But better a Conservative clog than a Socialist

menace and a Jacobin Convention."

By the side of Mr. O'Donnell's account of his own ideal for Ireland we will place his estimate of the policy which wrecked the Liberal Party in 1886:— "When was Mr. Gladstone converted to Home Rule ? Mr. Gladstone was never converted to Home Rule, except to Home Rule for England. He endeavoured to free the British Parlia- ment from the incursions and disturbances of a band of aliens.

Surely never was a piece of audacity more marvellous than all the Irish legislation of the Grand Old Man. Without an hour's experience of Ireland, without having ever trod on Irish soil, agricultural or pastoral, he had produced and applied Land Act after Land Act, and had sent to Kilmainham, suspended the rights of the subject, and exhausted the resources of menace and invita- tion in order to make agrarian agitation absolutely perpetual. He was now to 'upset the Act of Union and to split the Liberal party, to confound Mr. Pitt and to belaud Mr. Grattan, on behalf of an original measure as purely Gladstonian as one of his contributions to the Contemporary Review, but which neither Pitt nor Grattan

would touch with a forty-foot pole." , Why, then, did Parnell dismiss so lightly a policy which he

• A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party. By P. Hugh O'Donnell. 2 vols. London Longman" and Co. (24s. net had claimed as his own so short a time before P No doubt the circumstance that Mr. Gladstone thought that the sub- stitute would have a better chance of acceptance in England weighed with him. But apart from this he had already com- mitted himself beyond redemption to methods of agrarian violence with which Butt's plan was wholly incompatible. Parnell's power rested on that very war of classes which Butt had so desired to avoid. It was useless to talk to the Land League of the Irish House of Commons and the Irish House of Lords. What the League wanted was an Irish Convention.

Mr. O'Donnell laments with good reason that a letter whioh he sent to the Times on May 3rd, 1882, was not printed till May 6th. Had it appeared two days earlier the warning contained in it might possibly have gained a hearing in Dublin Castle. Its purpose was to convince the Government that Parnell's release from Kilmainham was no ground for any suspension of police activity. "Let no precaution be dropped. Let greater care than ever surround every menaced life. Let no opportunity be given for crimes which might undo all the hopes of a better future." On the morning of Saturday. May 6th, this appeared in London. On the same afternoon Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered in Phoenix Park. That Parnell knew nothing of this crime ought to have been too obvious even then to need saying. It threatened to be fatal to his new alliance with Mr. Glad- stone,—an alliance which from that time forward was to be the keystone of his policy. The assassinations had merely shown that at the moment of arriving at an understanding he was powerless to fulfil his obligations under it. "I was present," says Mr. O'Donnell, " at the meeting in the Westminster Palace Hotel at midday of that

Sunday, May 7, 1882 Parnell was almost incapable of thought. He was white and broken. I shall resign and quit politics for ever.' " Mr. O'Donnell is sure, as every one else must now be, of Parnell's entire innocence of any know- ledge of the murders. But he points out that the Invincibles were not likely to put any faith in his protestations. " He had been tolerant of too many atrocities for his wrath at one which spoiled some of his plans to excite respect." Their view was that Parnell " knew well what was being done, though all the bridges were cut that might lead up to him," and their comment on his expressions of horror at the Phoenix Park tragedy was simply that Joe Brady "had as good right to kill Cavendish as others to kill Lord Mountmorres." Parnell's dislike of assassination may have been perfectly genuine, but there is no instance of its finding expression except when silence would have been hostile to his personal interests.

Mr. O'Donnell uses great plainness of speech about the rela- tions of successive English Governments with the Irish Roman Catholic clergy. The position he claims for himself is that of a good Catholic with a strong anti-clerical bias. The two characters are not incompatible, because they have to do with different subjects. Mr. O'Donnell would describe himself as perfectly orthodox, since he accepts every dogma of the Roman Catholic religion. So long as the Irish clergy confine themselves to their proper subjects—to theology and morals— they have in him an unquestioning disciple. It is only when they trespass on the field of politics, or assert their official supremacy in every department of secular education, that he grows restive. We have great sympathy with his attitude, though, for a reason we shall give directly, we do not think he has quite made out his case. His contention is that there is all the difference in the world between non-clericalism and anti- clericalism. The distinction could not be better stated than, in the following passage :—" If wise and holy counsels have enlightened the souls of individuals, those individuals will bring their religious and moral principles to the right discharge of their civil obligations. The place of the priest is in the pulpit and the sanctuary, not in the Cabinet nor among the Cabinet makers." Mr. O'Donnell maintains that this salutary doctrine has been set at defiance in Ireland by the educational policy of one Government after another. His first instance is the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878. The object of this measure was to provide prizes for successful pupils in Irish schools. The Com- missioners appointed to administer the Act "were nominated by the religions bodies," and as a, matter of course the schools which rapidly grew up under their care belonged

for the most part to the Religious Orders. Even a high Roman Catholic authority -Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick -has described the result of this measure as the production of "total failures, unfit for anything under heaven," while Mr.

Birrell has characterised them as " money-making machines." The next step of Mr. Disraeli's Government was to abolish the Queen's University, and to set up in place of it the merely examining University which lasted till the other day. "The pretext," says Mr. O'Donnell, " was the alleged impossibility of Catholics attending an undenominational University."

Why, then, be asks, did English Roman Catholics refuse to send their sons to the Roman Catholic University which the Pope and Cardinal Manning tried to set up in London, and why, when the experiment came to an end in consequence, did "the Jesuits and the Benedictines at once set about opening Catholic halls of residence at Oxford and Cambridge, just as they could do in Queen's College, Cork or Galway " ? Why, again, do students for the Catholic priesthood " go in thousands to the undenominational Universities of Austria and Germany " P In the first half of the last century the Irish schools were lay. " To-day there is hardly a lay school in the country." More than that, no lay Irishman or Irish- woman " can live decently by teaching within the coast-line of Ireland. Hundreds of young girls cannot get bread to eat, unless they take the veil and become, for bread's sake, teaching Sisters." And then Mr. O'Donnell turns upon the present Government :-

" The Birrell University Act the other day has given the so- called National University absolutely into the hands of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and the Rector of the Jesuits.

The gates of the University, the College, the School, remain locked and double-barred against the Irish Catholic layman and laywoman."

We have not the means of testing the accuracy of Mr.

O'Donnell's charges, though we fear that there may be some foundation for them. But what else could an English Govern- ment, wishing to deal fairly by Irish Roman Catholics, have done so long as Irish lay opinion leaves educational matters to be settled by the Roman Catholic hierarchy ? As between lay and clerical demands, an English Minister might act upon his own

judgment. But when he is confronted by a single demand- and that one which purports to embody the wishes of the Irish Roman Catholic population, lay and clerical-we do not see that he has any choice but to accept it as conclusive evidence

of Roman Catholic opinion. To all appearance the Roman Catholic laity of Ireland find no fault with the relations at present subsisting between themselves and their clergy. It is hardly reasonable to expect Governments, mainly English and Protestant, to legislate for feelings and aspirations which are content to lie concealed from the public gaze. They can only help those who will help themselves.

We have only touched on portions of Mr. O'Donnell's book, and considerations of space compel us to leave unnoticed much that is of quite equal interest.