of State Legislatures—­which have no responsibility for our foreign relations—­or the sycophancy of public men.  If it were proved to demonstration that Home Rule would be the salvation of Ireland, no American citizen would have any more right to take an active part in furthering it than to take an active part in dethroning the Czar of all the Russias.  The lesson which Washington administered to Citizen Genet, when that meddlesome minister of the French Republic undertook to “boom” the rights of men by issuing letters of marque at Charleston, has governed the foreign relations of the United States ever since, and it is as binding upon every private citizen as upon every public servant of the Republic.

I must ask my readers, therefore, to bear it constantly in mind that all my observations and comments have been made from an American, not from a British or an Irish point of view.  How or by whom Ireland shall be governed concerns me only in so far as the government of Ireland may affect the character and the tendencies of the Irish people, and thereby, through the close, intimate, and increasing connection between the Irish people and the people of the United States, may tend to affect the future of my country.  This being my point of view, it will be apparent, I think, that I have at least laboured under no temptation to see things otherwise than as they were, or to state things otherwise than as I saw them.

With Arthur Young, who more clearly than any other man of his time saw the end from the beginning of the fatuous and featherheaded French Revolution of 1789, I have always been inclined to think “the application of theory to methods of government a surprising imbecility in the human mind:”  and it will be found that in this book I have done little more than set down, as fully and clearly as I could, what I actually saw and heard in Ireland.  My method has been as simple as my object.  During each day as occasion served, and always at night, I made stenographic notes of whatever had attracted my attention or engaged my interest.  As I had no case to make for or against any political party or any theory of government in Ireland, I took things great and small, and people high and low, as they came, putting myself in contact by preference, wherever I could, with those classes of the Irish people of whom we see least in America, and concerning myself, as to my notes, only that they should be made under the vivid immediate impress of whatever they were to record.  These notes I have subsequently written out in the spirit in which I made them, in all cases taking what pains I could to verify statements of facts, and in many cases, where it seemed desirable or necessary, submitting the proofs of the pages as finally printed to the persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.

I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to read the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what I heard.