ty at Rome with such a final sentence upon the
true nature of Mr. George's "exclusive taxation of land," as the
clear-sighted Archbishop of New York is said to be seeking to obtain
from the Holy Office. What the end will be I have little doubt. But for
the moment, it will be seen, the situation in America is only less
confused and troublesome than the situation in Ireland. It is confused
and troubled too, as I have tried in this prologue to show, by forces
identical in character with those which confuse and trouble the
situation in Ireland.

Of the social conditions amid and against which those forces are working
in America, I believe myself to have some knowledge.

To get an actual touch and living sense of the social conditions amid
and against which they are working in Ireland was my object, I repeat,
in making the visits, of which this book is a record. More than this I
could not hope, in the time at my disposal, to do. With very much less
than this, it appears to me, many persons, whose views of Irish affairs
I had been inclined, before making these visits, to regard with respect,
must have found it possible to rest content.

CHAPTER I.

DUBLIN, _Monday, Jan. 30, 1888._--I left London last night. The train
was full of people going to attend levees and drawing-rooms about to be
held at Dublin Castle.

Near Watford we lost half an hour by the breaking of a connecting-rod:
but the London and North-Western is a model railway, and we ran
alongside the pier at Holyhead exactly "on time." There is no such
railway travelling in America, excepting on the Pennsylvania Central;
and the North-Western sleeping-carriages, if less monumental and
elaborate than ours, are better ventilated, and certainly not less
comfortable.

I had expected to come upon unusual things and people in Ireland, but I
had not expected to travel thither in company with an Irish Jacobite.
Two of my fellow-passengers, chatting as they smoked their cigarettes
in the little vestibule between the cabins of the carriage, had much to
say about Lord Ashburnham, and the "Order of the White Rose," and the
Grand Mass to be celebrated to-morrow morning at the Church of the
Carmelites in London, in memory of Charles Edward Stuart, who died at
Rome in 1788, and now lies buried as Charles III., King of Great Britain
and Ireland, in the vaults of the Vatican, together with his father
"James III.," and his brother "Henry IX." One of the two was as hot and