remembered, not as the leader who helped to force a Liberal Government to produce two Home Rule Bills but as the leader who said ‘No man can set bounds to the march of a nation....’  To him the British Empire was an abstraction in which Ireland had no spiritual concern; it formed part of the order of the material world in which Ireland found a place; it had, like the climatic conditions of Europe, or the Gulf Stream, a real and preponderating influence on the destinies of Ireland.  But the Irish claim was, to him, the claim of a nation to its inherent rights, not the claim of a portion of an empire to its share in the benefits which the Constitution of that empire bestowed upon its more favoured parts.”

Judged by the most varied standards and opinions the greatness of Parnell as the leader of a nation is universally conceded.  The question may be asked:  But what did Parnell actually accomplish to entitle him to this distinction?  I will attempt briefly to summarise his achievements.  He found a nation of serfs, and if he did not actually make a nation of freemen of them he set them on the high road to freedom, he gave them a measure of their power when united and disciplined, and he taught them how to resist and combat the arrogance, the greed and the inbred cruelty of landlordism.  He struck at England through its most vulnerable point—­through its Irish garrison, with its cohorts of unscrupulous mercenaries and hangers-on.  He struck at it in the very citadel of its own vaunted liberties—­in the Parliament whose prestige was its proudest possession and which he made it his aim to shatter, to ridicule and to destroy.  He converted an Irish Party of complaisant time-servers, Whigs and office-seekers into a Party of irreproachable incorruptibility, unbreakable unity, iron discipline and a magnificently disinterested patriotism.  He formulated the demand for Irish nationhood with clearness and precision.  He knew how to bargain with the wiliest and subtlest statesman of his age, and great and powerful as Gladstone was he met in Parnell a man equally conscious of his own strength and equally tenacious of his principles.  In fact, on every encounter the ultimate advantage rested with Parnell.  He won on the Land Question, he won on the labourer’s demands, he won on the Home Rule issue and he showed what a potent weapon the balance of power could be in the hands of a capable and determined Irish leader.

Not alone did he create an impregnable Irish Party; he established a united Irish race throughout the world.  His sway was acknowledged with the same implicit confidence among the exiled Irish in America and Australia as it was by the home-folk in Ireland.  He was the great cementing influence of an Irish solidarity such as was never before attempted or realised.  He did a great deal to arrest the outflow of the nation’s best blood by emigration, and, if he had no strong or striking policy on matters educational and industrial, he gave manhood to the people, he developed character in them, he gave them security in their lands and homes, and, if the unhappy cataclysm of his later days had not be-fallen, he would unquestionably have given them a measure of self-government from which they could march onward to the fullest emancipation that the status of nationhood demands.