I have too good an opinion of his capacity to believe that they have; and when the secret history of the Chicago Convention comes to be written, I expect to find such confirmation therein of my notions on this subject as I could neither ask nor, if I asked, could expect to get from him.

Meanwhile the manliness and courage of the man must always command for him the respect, not to say the admiration, even of those who most sternly condemn his course and oppose his policy.

Born the child of an evicted tenant, in the times when an eviction meant such misery and suffering as are seldom, if ever, now caused by the process—­bred and maimed for life in an English factory—­captured when hardly more than a lad in Captain M’Cafferty’s daring attempt to seize Chester Castle, and sent for fifteen years by Lord Chief-Justice Cockburn into penal servitude of the most rigorous kind, Michael Davitt might have been expected to be an apostle of hate not against the English Government of Ireland alone, but against England and the English people.  The truculent talk of too many of his countrymen presents Ireland to the minds of thoughtful men as a flagrant illustration of the truth so admirably put by Aubrey de Vere that “worse than wasted weal is wasted woe.”  But woe has not been wasted upon Michael Davitt, in this, that, so far as I know (and I have watched his course now with lively personal interest ever since I made his acquaintance on his first visit to America), he has never made revenge and retaliation upon England either the inspiration or the aim of his revolutionary policy.  I have never heard him utter, and never heard of his uttering, in America, such malignant misrepresentations of the conduct of the English people and their sovereign during the great famine of 1847, for example, as those which earned for Mr. Parnell in 1880 the pretty unanimous condemnation of the American press.  How far he went with Mr. Parnell on the lines of that speech at New Ross, in which murder was delicately mentioned as “an unnecessary and prejudicial measure of procedure” in certain circumstances, I do not know.  But he can hardly have gone further than certain persons calling themselves English Liberals went when the assassins of Napoleon III. escaped to England.  And he has a capacity of being just to opponents, which certainly all his associates do not possess.  I was much struck to-day by the candour and respect with which he spoke of John Bright, whose name came incidentally into our conversation.  He seemed to feel personally annoyed and hurt as an Irishman, that Irishmen should permit themselves to revile and abuse Mr. Bright because he will not go with them on the question of Home Rule, in utter oblivion of the great services rendered by him to the cause of the Irish people “years before many of those whose tongues now wag against him had tongues to wag.”  I was tempted to remind him that not with Irishmen only is gratitude a lively sense of favours to come.