I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may be better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which these conclusions have been drawn.  Such as they are, I have put them into a few pages at the end of the book.

It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject of Home Rule for Ireland.  Until it shall be ascertained what “Home Rule for Ireland” means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside the domain of my inquiries.  “Home Rule for Ireland” is not now a plan—­nor so much as a proposition.  It is merely a polemical phrase, of little importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland, however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic.  It may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain’s imperialist scheme of four Provincial Councils—­which recalls the outlines of a system once established with success in New Zealand—­to that absolute and complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland from the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been the aim of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the last twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the “Home Rule” party in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to have pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to impede.  On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary evidence was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr. Sheridan, at a time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited by those murders in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now admitted by the best informed authorities that Mr. Sheridan had no responsibility, was driving Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates into disavowals of the extreme men of their connection, which, but for Mr. Sheridan’s coolness and consciousness of his well-assured domination over them, might have led to extremely inconvenient consequences to all concerned.[5] But whatever “Home Rule” may or may not mean, I went to Ireland, not to find some achromatic meaning for a prismatic phrase, which is flashed at you fifty times in England or America where you encounter it once in Ireland, but to learn what I could of the social and economical condition of the Irish people as affected by the revolutionary forces which are now at work in that country.

I have watched the development of these forces too long and too closely to be under any illusion as to the real importance relatively with them of the so-called “Parliamentary” action of the Irish Nationalists.

II.