I have had occasion to say in these volumes of the
"irrepressible conflict" between his schemes and the establishment of a
peasant proprietorship in Ireland. It is more than this. It is a
distinct warning served upon the smallest tenants as well as upon the
greatest landlords in the United Kingdom that fixity of any form of
individual tenure is irreconcilable with the Agrarian agitations.

I anticipated this demonstration, but I did not anticipate that it would
come so fully or so soon.

I anticipated also abundant proof from my own side of the water of the
accuracy of my impressions as to the drift of the American-Irish towards
Protection and Republicanism in American politics. This, too, has come
earlier and not less fully than I had expected. Mr. Patrick Ford, the
most influential leader of the American-Irish, issued early in August a
statement of his views as to the impending Presidential election. "The
issue to-day," he says, "is the Tariff. It is the American system
_versus_ the British Colonial system. The Irish are instinctively
Protectionists." And why? Mr. Ford goes on to explain. "The fact," he
observes, "that the Lion and the Unicorn have taken the stump for
Cleveland and Thurnan is not calculated to hurt Harrison and Morton in
the estimation of the Irish, who will, I promise, give a good account of
themselves in the coming Presidential election." Hatred of England, in
other words, is an axiom in their Political Economy!

Mr. Davitt's menacing allusion to Parnell as a landlord, and Mr.
O'Leary's scornful treatment in a letter to me of the small-fry English
Radicals,[1] when taken together, distinctly prefigure an imminent
rupture between the Parnellite party and the two wings--Agrarian and
Fenian--of the real revolutionary movement in Ireland. It is clear that
clerical agitators, high and low, must soon elect between following Mr.
George, Dr. M'Glynn, and Mr. Davitt, and obeying fully the Papal Decree.

It is a most curious feature of the situation in Ireland that much more
discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to
be felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It
is the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in
Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien
oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with
which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the
tameness of the Irish