KATHARINE.  We didn’t give it, my dear.

PARNELL.  Well, their proof has satisfied them, anyhow:  as they are acting on it.  Oh!  When I see what poor, weak things nations really are—­so inadequately equipped for the shaping of their own destinies—­I wonder whether in truth the history we read is not the wrong history—­mere side history, to which a false significance has been given, because so much blood and treasure have been expended on it, which just a little expenditure of common sense might have spared....  Think of all the silly accidents and blunders, in Ireland’s great chapter of accidents, which have counted for so much—­even in these last few years!...  The Phoenix Park business—­an assassination, for which perhaps only a dozen men were responsible—­and at once, for that one act, more suppression and hatred and coercion are directed against a whole nation:  Crimes Acts, packed juries, judges without juries, arrests without charge, imprisonments without trial.  So logical, isn’t it?  What a means for putting a foreign Government right in the eyes of the people who deny its moral authority!...  And then—­Pigott, that shallow fraud, driven to suicide by those who were at first so eager to believe him:  and the exposure of his silly forgery turns elections, makes Home Rule popular!  Coming by such means, would it be worth it?...  Gladstone, honourably hoodwinking himself all those years, accepting you as our secret go-between—­and you making no pretence, my dear!  Oh, I suppose it was the right and gentlemanly thing for him to pretend not to know.  It was also, it seems, good politics.  Chamberlain knew too—­must have known; for Chamberlain’s no fool; and yet to his friend, the deceived husband, said nothing!  It wasn’t politics; not then.  Now—­now it’s the great stroke, and Home Rule goes down under it....  Is that history, or is it “Alice in Wonderland"?...  If you are my ruin now, you were also my ruin then, when you were helping me to think that I could win justice for a nation from politicians like these:  win it by any means except by beating them, bringing them to their knees, making them red with the blood of a people always in revolt, till their reputation stinks to the whole world!  And when they do at last climb down and accept the inevitable, then their main thought will be only how to save their own face—­and make it look a little less like the defeat they know it to be!

KATHARINE.  My dear, you are so tired.  Do rest!

PARNELL.  I am resting:  for now—­thanks to you—­I have got at the truth!  Political history is a thing made up of accidents; but not so the fate of men or of nations whose will is set to be free.  No accident there!  That you were tied to a man you wouldn’t live with, who wouldn’t live with you—­was an accident.  But our love was no accident; it was waiting for us before we knew anything.  You and I had each a star which shone at the other’s birth.

KATHARINE.  Your star was mine, dearest.  I hadn’t one of my own.