and incapacity.  What wonder that we felt ourselves outraged and wronged and bullied?  Huge demonstrations of protest were held in all parts of the country.  These were attended by men of all sects and of every political hue.  Nationalist and Unionist, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic stood on the same platform and vied with each other in denunciation of the common robber.  At Cork Lord Castletown recalled the Boston Tea riots.  At Limerick Lord Dunraven presided at a meeting which was addressed by the Most Rev. Dr O’Dwyer, the Catholic bishop of the diocese, and by Mr John Daly, a Fenian who had spent almost a lifetime in prison to expiate his nationality.

There was a general forgetfulness of quarrels and differences whilst this ferment of truly national indignation lasted.  But the cohesive materials were not sound enough to make it a lasting union of the whole people.  There were still class fights to be fought to their appointed end, and so the agitation gradually filtered out, and Ireland remains to-day still groaning under the intolerable burden of overtaxation, not lessened, but enormously increased, by a war which Ireland claims was none of her business.

The subsidence of the political fever from 1891 to 1898 was not without its compensations in other directions.  Ireland had time to think of other things, to enter into a sort of spiritual retreat—­to wonder whether if, after all, politics were everything, whether the exclusive pursuit of them did not mean that other vital factors in the national life were forgotten, and whether the attainment of material ambitions might not be purchased at too great a sacrifice—­at the loss of those spiritual and moral forces without which no nation can be either great or good in the best sense.  There was much to be done in this direction.  The iron of slavery had very nearly entered our souls.  Centuries of landlord oppression, of starvation, duplicity and Anglicisation had very nearly destroyed whatever there was of moral virtue and moral worth in our nature.  The Irish language—­our distinctive badge of nationhood—­had almost died upon the lips of the people.  The old Gaelic traditions and pastimes were fast fading away.  Had these gone we might, indeed, win Home Rule, but we would have lost things immeasurably greater, for “not by bread alone doth man live”—­we would have lost that independence of the soul, that moral grandeur, that intellectual distinction, that spiritual strength without which all the charters of liberty which any foreign Parliament could confer would be only so many “scraps of paper,” assuring us it may be of fine clothes and well-filled stomachs and self-satisfied minds, but conferring none of those glories whose shining illumines the dark ways of life and leads us towards that light which surpasseth all understanding.

Thanks to the workings of an inscrutable Providence it was, however, whilst the worst form of political stagnation had settled on the land that other deeper depths were stirring and that the people were of themselves moving towards a truer light and a higher leading.