enterprise he is managing, which promises, he
thinks, in spite of our tariff, to open the American markets to the
excellent woollen goods of Ireland. He has gone into it with all his
usual earnestness and ability. This is not a matter of politics with
him, but of patriotism and of business. He tells me he has already
secured very large orders from the United States. I hope he is not
surprised, as I certainly am not, to find that the Parliamentarian Irish
party give but a half-hearted and lukewarm support to such enterprises
as this. Perhaps he has forgotten, as I have not, the efforts which a
certain member of that party made in 1886 to persuade an Irish gentleman
from St. Louis, who had brought over a considerable sum of money for the
relief of the distress in North-Western Ireland, into turning it over
to the League, on the express ground that the more the people were made
to feel the pinch of the existing order of things, the better it would
be for the revolutionary movement.

The Irish Woollen Company will, nevertheless, be a success, I believe,
and a success of considerably more value to Ireland than the election of
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as M.P. for Deptford would be.

As to this election, Mr. Davitt seems to feel no great confidence. He
has spoken in support of Mr. Blunt's candidacy, and is hard at work now
to promote it. But he is not sanguine as to the result, as on all
questions, save Home Rule for Ireland, Mr. Blunt's views and ideas, he
thinks, antagonise the record of Mr. Evelyn and the local feeling at
Deptford. I was almost astonished to learn from Mr. Davitt that Mr.
Blunt, by the way, had told him at Ballybrack, long before he was locked
up, how Mr. Balfour meant to lock up and kill four men, the "pivots" of
the Irish movement, to wit, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Harrington, Mr. Dillon, and
Mr. Davitt himself. But I was not at all astonished to learn that Mr.
Blunt told him all this most seriously, and evidently believed it.

"How did you take it?" I asked.

"Oh, I only laughed," said Mr. Davitt, "and told him it would take more
than Mr. Balfour to kill me, at any rate by putting me in prison. As for
being locked up, I prefer Cuninghame Graham's way of taking it, that he
meant 'to beat the record on oakum!'"

If all the Irish "leaders" were made of the same stuff with Mr. Davitt,
the day of a great Democratic revolution, not in Ireland only, but in
Great Britain, might be a good deal nearer than anything in the sig