e, and sent for fifteen years by Lord Chief-Justice
Cockburn into penal servitude of the most rigorous kind, Michael Davitt
might have been expected to be an apostle of hate not against the
English Government of Ireland alone, but against England and the English
people. The truculent talk of too many of his countrymen presents
Ireland to the minds of thoughtful men as a flagrant illustration of the
truth so admirably put by Aubrey de Vere that "worse than wasted weal is
wasted woe." But woe has not been wasted upon Michael Davitt, in this,
that, so far as I know (and I have watched his course now with lively
personal interest ever since I made his acquaintance on his first visit
to America), he has never made revenge and retaliation upon England
either the inspiration or the aim of his revolutionary policy. I have
never heard him utter, and never heard of his uttering, in America, such
malignant misrepresentations of the conduct of the English people and
their sovereign during the great famine of 1847, for example, as those
which earned for Mr. Parnell in 1880 the pretty unanimous condemnation
of the American press. How far he went with Mr. Parnell on the lines of
that speech at New Ross, in which murder was delicately mentioned as "an
unnecessary and prejudicial measure of procedure" in certain
circumstances, I do not know. But he can hardly have gone further than
certain persons calling themselves English Liberals went when the
assassins of Napoleon III. escaped to England. And he has a capacity of
being just to opponents, which certainly all his associates do not
possess. I was much struck to-day by the candour and respect with which
he spoke of John Bright, whose name came incidentally into our
conversation. He seemed to feel personally annoyed and hurt as an
Irishman, that Irishmen should permit themselves to revile and abuse Mr.
Bright because he will not go with them on the question of Home Rule, in
utter oblivion of the great services rendered by him to the cause of
the Irish people "years before many of those whose tongues now wag
against him had tongues to wag." I was tempted to remind him that not
with Irishmen only is gratitude a lively sense of favours to come.

I find Mr. Davitt quite awake to the great importance of the granite
quarries of Donegal. He is bestirring himself in connection with some
men of Manchester, in behalf of the quarries at Belmullet in Mayo,
which, if I am not mistaken, is his native c