d, in the shape of the landlord, was
heavy upon it. After a season of unexampled agricultural prosperity
the lean years had come to the Irish farmer and he was ripe for
agitation and resistance. Butt had the Irish gentry on his side. With
the sure instinct of the born leader Parnell set out to fight them. He
had popular feeling with him. It was no difficult matter to rouse the
democracy of the country against a class at whose doors they laid the
blame for all their woes and troubles and manifold miseries. Butt was
likewise too old for his generation. He was a constitutional statesman
who made noble appeal to the honesty and honour of British statesmen.
Parnell, too, claimed to be a constitutional leader, but of another
type. With the help of men like Michael Davitt and John Devoy he was
able to muster the full strength of the revolutionary forces behind
him and he adopted other methods in Parliament than lackadaisical
appeals to the British sense of right and justice.

The time came when the older statesman had perforce to make way for
the younger leader. The man with a noble genius for statesman-like
design--and this must be conceded to Isaac Butt--had to yield place
and power to the men whose genius consisted in making themselves
amazingly disagreeable to the British Government, both in Ireland and
at Westminster. "The Policy of Exasperation" was the epithet applied
by Butt to the purpose of Parnell, in the belief that he was uttering
the weightiest reproach in his power against it. But this was the
description of all others which recommended it to the Irish race--for
it was, in truth, the only policy which could compel British statesmen
to give ear to the wretched story of Ireland's grievances and to
legislate in regard to them. It is sad to have to write it of Butt, as
of so many other Irish leaders, that he died of a broken heart. Those
who would labour for "Dark Rosaleen" have a rough and thorny road to
travel, and they are happy if the end of their journey is not to be
found in despair, disappointment and bitter tragedy.

Parnell, once firmly seated in the saddle, lost no time in asserting
his power and authority. Mr William O'Brien, who writes with a quite
unique personal authority on the events of this time, tells us that
there is some doubt whether "Joe" Biggar, as he was familiarly known
from one end of Ireland to the other, was not the actual inventor of
Parliamentary obstruction. His own opinion is that it