sequently a
large landlord in America, if he were lucky enough to get tenants at
all, would be very chary indeed about quarrelling with more than one of
them at a time. The tenants would no more submit to wholesale ejectment
than the farmers in Missouri would submit some years ago to a tax levy
on their property to pay county bonds given in aid of a railroad. The
goods of some of them were seized, but a large body of them attended the
sale armed with rifles, having previously issued a notice that the place
would be very "unhealthy" for outside bidders.

The bearing of this condition of American opinion on the Irish question
will be plainer if I remind English readers that the Irish in the United
States numbered in 1880 nearly 2,000,000, and that the number of persons
of Irish parentage is probably between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000. In short
there are, as well as one can judge, more Irish nationalists in the
United States than in Ireland. The Irish-Americans are to-day the only
large and prosperous Irish community in the world. The children of the
Irish born in the United States or brought there in their infancy are
just as Irish in their politics as those who have grown up at home.
Patrick Ford, for instance, the editor of the _Irish World_, who is such
a shape of dread to some Englishmen, came to America in childhood, and
has no personal knowledge nor recollection of Irish wrongs. Of the part
this large Irish community plays in stimulating agitation--both agrarian
and political--at home I need not speak; Englishmen are very familiar
with it, and are very indignant over it. The Irish-Americans not only
send over a great deal of American money to their friends at home, but
they send over American ideas, and foremost among them American
hostility to large landowners, and American belief in Home Rule. Now, to
me, one of the most curious things in the English state of mind about
the Irish problem is the apparent expectation that this Irish-American
interference is transient, and will probably soon die out. It is quite
true, as Englishmen are constantly told, that "the best Americans," that
is, the literary people and the commercial magnates, whom travelling
Englishmen see on the Atlantic coast, dislike the Irish anti-English
agitation. But it is also true that the disapproval of the "best
Americans" is not of the smallest practical consequence, particularly as
it is largely due to complete indifference to, and ignorance of, th