he added, “ask any Nationalist you know whether members of the League in the country allow farmers who are not members to associate with them in any way.  I can cite you a case at Ballingarry, in my county, where last summer a resolution of the League was published and put on the Chapel door, that members of the National League were thenceforth to have no dealings or communication with any person not a member.  This I saw with my own eyes, and it was matter of public notoriety.”

I lunched at the City Club with Mr. M’Carthy.  Sir Daniel O’Sullivan, formerly Mayor of Cork, whose views of Home Rule seem to differ widely from those of his successor, now incarcerated here, was one of the company.  In the course of an animated but perfectly good-natured discussion of the Land Law question between two other gentlemen present, one of them, a strong Nationalist, smote his Unionist opponent very neatly under the fifth rib.  The latter contending that it was monstrous to interfere by law with the principle of freedom of contract, the Nationalist responded, “That cannot be; it must be right and legitimate to do it, for the Imperial Parliament has done it four times within seventeen years!”

I walked with Mr. M’Carthy to his apartments, where he showed me many curious papers and volumes bearing on municipal law and municipal history in Ireland.  Among these, two most elaborate and interesting volumes, being the Council Books of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale, from 1610 to 1659, 1666 to 1687, and 1690 to 1800.  The records for the years not enumerated have perished, that is, for the first five or six years after the Restoration, and for the years just preceding and just following the fall of James II.  These volumes take one back to the condition of Southern Ireland immediately after English greed and intrigue had sapped the foundations of the peace which followed the submission of the great Earl of Tyrone, and brought about the flight to the Continent of that chieftain, and of his friend and ally, the Earl of Tyrconnell.

They give us no picture, unfortunately, of the closing years of Elizabeth’s long struggle to establish the English power, or of the occupation of Kinsale by the Spanish in the name of the Pope.  But there is abundant evidence in them of the theological hatred which so embittered the conflict of races in Ireland during the seventeenth century.

It was a relief to turn from these to a solemn controversy waged in our own times between Cork and Limerick over a question of municipal precedence, in which Mr. M’Carthy did battle for the City of the Galley and the Towers[7] against the City of the Gateway and Cathedral dome.  The truth seems to be that King John gave charters to both cities, but to Cork twelve years earlier than to Limerick.  Speaking of this contest, by the way, with a loyalist of Cork to-night, I observed that it was almost as odd to find such a question hotly disputed between two Nationalist cities as to see the champions of Irish independence marching under the banner of the harp, which was invented for Ireland by Henry VIII.