In 1870, Mr. O’Leary and his companions were released and pardoned on condition of remaining beyond the British dominions until the expiration of their sentences.  Mr. O’Leary fixed his residence for a time in Paris, and thence went to America, where he and Kickham were regarded as the leaders of the American branch of the I. R. B. He returned to Ireland in 1885, his term of sentence having then expired, and it was shortly after his return that he gave to my correspondent the letter upon Irish affairs to which I have already referred.  He had been chosen President of the “Young Ireland Society” of Dublin before he returned, and in that capacity delivered at the Rotunda, in the Irish capital, before a vast crowd assembled to welcome him back, an address which showed how thoughtfully and calmly he had devoted himself during his long years of imprisonment and exile to the cause of Ireland.  Mr. William O’Brien, M.P., and Mr. Redmond, M.P., took part in this reception, but their subsequent course shows that they can hardly have relished Mr. O’Leary’s fearless and outspoken protests against the intolerance and injustice of the agrarian organisation which controls their action.  In England, as well as well as in Ireland, Mr. O’Leary spoke to great multitudes of his countrymen, and always in the same sense.  Mr. Rolleston tells me that Mr. O’Leary’s denunciations of “the dynamite section of the Irish people,” to use the euphemism of an American journal, “are the only ones ever uttered by an Irish leader, lay or clerical.”  The day must come, if it be not already close at hand, when the Irish leader of whom this can be truly said, must be felt by his own people to be the one man worthy of their trust.  The thing that has been shall be, and there is nothing new under the sun.  The Marats and the Robespierres, the Bareres and the Collots, are the pallbearers, not the standard-bearers of liberty.

Towards the National League, as at present administered on the lines of the agrarian agitation, Mr. O’Leary has so far preserved an attitude of neutrality, though he has never for a moment hesitated either in public or in private most vehemently to condemn such sworn Fenians as have accepted seats in the British Parliament, speaking his mind freely and firmly of them as “double-oathed men” playing a constitutional part with one hand, and a treasonable part with the other.

Yet he is not at one with the extreme and fanatical Fenians who oppose constitutional agitation simply because it is constitutional.  His objection to the existing Nationalism was exactly put, Mr. Rolleston tells me, by a clever writer in the Dublin Mail, who said that O’Connell having tried “moral force” and failed, and the Fenians having tried “physical force” and failed, the Leaguers were now trying to succeed by the use of “immoral force.”