Dr. Sigerson, who, as a man of science, must necessarily revolt from the coarse and clumsy methods of the blunderers who have done so much since 1885 to discredit the cause of Ireland, evidently clings to the hope that something may still be saved from the visible wreck of what has come, even in Ireland, to be called “Parnellism,” and he good-naturedly persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as “mugwumps.”  For the “mugwumps” of my own country I have no particular admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them as “Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might have been Magdalens.”  But these Irish “mugwumps” seem to me to earn their title by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland.  “What certain ‘Parnellites’ object to,” said one of the company, “is that we can’t be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.  Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and to administer it by falsehood.  We don’t."[27] This is precisely the spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England this week.  “I have been slowly forced,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland.  It has plunged this country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at least a generation to recover.  It is teaching the people that no law of justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to interfere with the political ends of the moment.  It is, in fact, absolutely divorcing morality from politics.  The mendacity of some of its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland.”

It is the spirit, too, of a letter which I received not long ago from the west of Ireland, in which my correspondent quoted the bearer of one of the most distinguished of Irish names, and a strong “Home Ruler,” as saying to him, “These Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the Bushmen of South Africa.”

This very day I find in one of the leading Nationalist journals here letters from Mr. Davitt, Mr. O’Leary, and Mr. Taylor himself, which convict that journal of making last week a statement about Mr. Taylor absolutely untrue, and, so far as appears, absolutely without the shadow of a foundation.  These letters throw such a curious light on passing events here at this moment that I shall preserve them.[28] The statement to which they refer was thus put in the journal which made it:  “We have absolute reason to know that when the last Coercion Act was in full swing this pure-souled and disinterested patriot (Mr. John F. Taylor) begged for, received, and accepted a very petty Crown Prosecutorship under a Coercion Government.  As was wittily said at the time, He sold his principles, not for a mess of pottage, but for the stick that stirred the mess.”  This is no assertion “upon hearsay”—­no publication of a rumour or report.  It is an assertion made, not upon belief even, but upon a claim of “absolute knowledge.”