The interest of the week as regards the Parnell Commission
has been the examination and cross-examination of Mr. O'Brien, of which the chief feature has been the extraordinary inconsistency of Mr. O'Brien's remarkably frank criticism on his own and other performances. For example, he regards "black-listing,"—that is, putting up lists of persons who were not members of the Land League or National League,—as intimidation of an objectionable kind, which he says that he disapproves and condemns ; but he regards his own exhorta- tions to the Leaguers to make land-grabbing " risky" as not involving intimidation at all. He constantly disapproves and regrets language used by others as tending to excitement and violence, while he maintains that what appears to most people very much stronger and more exciting language used by him- self is strictly "constitutional," though not perhaps "legal" in the narrower sense. Mr. O'Brien's evidence was indeed frank in the extreme, but extraordinarily difficult to under- stand on any principle except this,—that whatever Mr. O'Brien had said, however outrageous it sounded, was in effect perfectly constitutional and consistent with a hatred of all outrages, just because it was he who had said it. On the other hand, he often disapproved of what his subordinates or colleagues had said, even when it sounded much less provoca- tive of outrage than his own words ; but then, he always maintained that his nominal responsibility in these cases was not and could not have been real. Even the coarse and brutal attack on Lord Spencer in United Ireland, which he now regrets, he apologises for on the principle that Lord Spencer was the figure-head of so much that was detestable, that it was in a sense necessary to run him down. As a moral curiosity, we know nothing like Mr. O'Brien's cross-examination.
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