A further step in securing Irish support occurred at the end of July, and perhaps of all the strange events which have occurred in the government of Ireland it is the strangest.  Lord Carnarvon solicited through one of his colleagues, and obtained, an interview with Mr. Parnell, and the circumstances under which this occurred between the Queen’s Lord Lieutenant and the leader to whom men attributed treason and condoning assassinations is perhaps the most curious part of the whole story.

The meeting took place at the very end of the London season, not in the Houses of Parliament nor in a club of which one or other of the parties was a member, but in an empty house in Grosvenor Square, from which all the servants had gone away.  It is a piquant feature of the event, shrouded as it was with all these circumstances of mystery, that the gentleman who was in the secret and offered his house for the meeting was no other than that rigid Imperialist, Col.  Sir Howard Vincent, who had only the year before retired from the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard.  When the occurrence of this interview became known, nearly a year later, Mr. Parnell declared—­and the fact was never denied by Lord Carnarvon—­that the latter had pronounced himself in favour of an Irish Parliament with the power of protecting Irish industries.  The insistence by the Viceroy that he spoke only for himself appeared to the Irish leader to be mere formality, but in truth the Cabinet knew nothing of the interview.  Lord Salisbury was informed that it was going to take place, raised no objection to its occurrence, and on receiving afterwards, both verbatim and in writing, accounts of what had occurred, praised the discretion of his Viceroy.

In view of what had happened it was not surprising that in the month of August Mr. Parnell made an explicit demand for the restoration of Grattan’s Parliament, with the right of taxing foreign and even English imports for the benefit of the Irish home trade—­a proposal not so revolutionary as it would now appear, seeing that less than forty years had elapsed since the Irish Custom House had for the first time begun to admit all English goods duty free.

Mr. Parnell’s manifesto was followed by Lord Salisbury’s speech at Newport, from which quotation has already been made, in which he expressed himself of opinion that Home Rule would be safer than popular local government, and further enhanced the impression that he was moving in the direction of the safer policy, by proceeding to frame what has been described as the nearest approach to an apologia for boycotting which has ever been made by an English statesman.  The election address of Lord Randolph Churchill—­the most popular and influential minister in the country—­contained no allusion to the threatened “dismemberment of the Empire,” and in his campaign his only allusion to Ireland was comprised in boasts of the success of the anti-coercion policy of Carnarvon;