The Irish cause was not revived until the Fenian movement.  Disgust with the politicians drove the noblest into their ranks.  In Stephens they found an organizing chief, in Boyle O’Reilly a poet, and in John O’Leary a political thinker, men who under other conditions had achieved mundane success.  The Fenians were defended by Isaac Butt, a big-hearted, broad-minded lawyer, who afterwards organized a party to convince Englishmen that Repeal was innocuous, when called “Home Rule.”  The people stood his patient ways patiently, but when a more desperate leader arrived they transferred allegiance, and Butt died of a broken heart.

Parnell took his place and began to marshal the broken forces of Irish democracy against his own class.  Butt had been a polite parliamentarian, reverencing the courtesy of debate and at heart loving the British Constitution.  Parnell felt that his mission lay in breaking rather than interpreting the law.  The well-bred House stared and protested when he defied their chosen six hundred.  Parnell faced them with their own marble callousness.  He outdid them in political cynicism and out-bowed them in frigid courtesy, while maintaining a policy before which tradition melted and a time-honored system collapsed.  In one stormy decade he tore the cloak from the Mother of Parliaments, reducing her to a plain-speaking democratic machine.  Through the breach he made, the English labor party has since entered.

He united priest and peasant, physical and moral force, under him.  He could lay Ireland under storm or lull at his pleasure.  His achievement equalled his self-confidence.  He reversed the Irish land system and threw English politics out of gear.  With the balance of power in his hand, he made Tory and Radical outbid each other for his support.  He was no organizer or orator, but he fascinated able men to conduct his schemes, as Napoleon used his marshals.  On a pregnant day he equaled the achievement of St. Paul and converted Gladstone, who had once been his gaoler.  Gladstone became a Home Ruler, and henceforth English politics knew no peace.

Parnell stood for the fall and rise of many.  Under his banner Irish peasants became human beings with human rights.  He felled the feudal class in Ireland and undermined them in England.  Incalculable forces were set to destroy him.  A forged letter in the Times classed him with assassins, while an legal Commission was sent to try his whole movement.  It is history that his triumphant vindication was followed by a greater fall.  The happiness of Ireland was sucked into the maelstrom of his ruin.  He refused to retire from leadership at Gladstone’s bidding, and Ireland staggered into civil war.  The end is known—­Parnell died as he had lived.  Of his moral fault there is no palliation, but it may be said he held his country’s honor dearer than his own, for he could not bear to see her win even independence by obeying the word of an Englishman.