But the greatest achievement of Parnell was the fact that he had both the great English parties bidding for his support.  We know that the Tory Party entered into negotiations with him on the Home Rule issue.  Meanwhile, however, there was the more notable conversion of Gladstone, a triumph of unparalleled magnitude for Parnell and in itself the most convincing testimony to the positive strength and absolute greatness of the man.  A wave of enthusiasm went up on both sides of the Irish Sea for the alliance which seemed to symbolise the ending of the age-long struggle between the two nations.  True, this alliance has since been strangely underrated in its effects, but there can be no doubt that it evoked at the time a genuine outburst of friendliness on the part of the Irish masses to England.  And at the General Election of 1885 Parnell returned from Ireland with a solid phalanx of eighty-four members—­eager, invincible, enthusiastic, bound unbreakably together in loyalty to their country and in devotion to their leader.

From 1885 to 1890 there was a general forgiving and forgetting of historic wrongs and ancient feuds.  The Irish Nationalists were willing to clasp hands across the sea in a brotherhood of friendship and even of affection, but there stood apart, in open and flaming disaffection, the Protestant minority in Ireland, who were in a state of stark terror that the Home Rule Bill of 1886 meant the end of everything for them—­the end of their brutal ascendancy and probably also the confiscation of their property and the ruin of their social position.

Then, as on a more recent occasion, preparations for civil war were going on in Ulster, largely of English Party manufacture, and more with an eye to British Party purposes than because of any sincere convictions on the rights of the ascendancy element.  Still the Grand Old Man carried on his indomitable campaign for justice to Ireland, notwithstanding the unfortunate cleavage which had taken place in the ranks of his own Party, and it does not require any special gift of prevision to assert, nor is it any unwarrantable assumption on the facts to say, that the alliance between the Liberal and Irish Parties would inevitably have triumphed as soon as a General Election came had not the appalling misunderstanding as to Gladstone’s “Nullity of Leadership” letter flung everything into chaos and irretrievably ruined the hopes of Ireland for more than a generation.

And this brings me to what I regard as the greatest of Irish tragedies—­the deposition and the dethronement of Parnell under circumstances which will remain for all time a sadness and a sorrow to the Irish race.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Devoy, although banished, did turn up secretly in Mayo when the Land League was being organised, and his orders were supreme with the secret societies.]

CHAPTER II