I find Mr. Davitt quite awake to the great importance of the granite quarries of Donegal.  He is bestirring himself in connection with some men of Manchester, in behalf of the quarries at Belmullet in Mayo, which, if I am not mistaken, is his native county.  This bent of his mind towards the material improvement of the condition of the Irish people, and the development of the resources of Ireland, is not only a mark of his superiority to the rank and file of the Irish politicians—­it goes far to explain the stronger hold which he undoubtedly has on the people in Ireland.  “Home Rule,” as now urged by the Irish politicians, certainly excites much more attention and emotion in America and England than it seems to do in Ireland.  It seems so simple and elementary to John Bull and Brother Jonathan that people should be suffered to manage their own affairs!  Yet the North would not suffer the South to do this—­and what would become of India if England turned it over in fragments to the native races?  The Land Question, on the contrary, touches the “business and bosom” of every Irishman in Ireland, while it is so complicated with historical conditions and incidents as to be troublesome and therefore uninteresting to people not immediately affected by it.  If I am right in my impressions the collapse of the National League will hardly weaken the hold of Mr. Davitt on the Irish people in Ireland, and it may even strengthen his hold on the agrarian movement in Wales, England, and Scotland, unless he identifies himself too completely in that collapse with his Parliamentary instruments.  On the other hand, the triumph of the National League on its present lines of action would diminish the value for good or evil of any man’s hold upon the Irish people, for the obvious reason that by driving out of Ireland, and ruining, the class of “landlords” and capitalists, it would leave the country reduced to a dead level of peasant-holdings, saddled with a system of poor-rates beyond the ability of the peasant-holders to carry, and at the mercy, therefore, of the first bad year.  The “war against the landlords,” as conducted by the National League, would end where the Irish difficulty began, in a general surrender of the people to “poverty and potatoes.”

CHAPTER VI.

ENNIS, Saturday, Feb. 18.—­I found it unnecessary to go on to Paris, and so returned to Ireland on Thursday night; we had a passage as over a lake.  In the train I met a lively Nationalist friend, whose acquaintance I made in America.  He is a man of substance, but not overburdened with respect for the public men, either of his own party or of the Unionist side.  When I asked him whether he still thought it would be safe to turn over Ireland to a Parliament made up of the Westminster members, of whom he gave me such an amusing but by no means complimentary account, he looked at me with astonishment:—­

“Do you suppose for a moment we would send these fellows to a Parliament in Dublin?”