sailed by Sir Edward Carson and his
gang and denounced by Mr Dillon and his faithful henchmen, deserted by
Mr Balfour at the moment when his support was vital, Mr Wyndham weakly
allowed himself to be badgered into disowning Home Rule, thus sealing
his doom as a statesman and as potential leader of his own party. The
secret history of this time when it is made public will disclose a
pitiful story of base intrigue and baser desertion and of a great and
chivalrous spirit stretched on the rack of Ireland's ill-starred
destiny. I do not think it is any exaggeration of the facts to say
that Wyndham was done to death, physically as well as politically, in
those evil days. Driven from office, with the ruin of all his high
hopes in shattered disorder around him, his proud soul was never able
to recover itself, and he drifted out of politics and into the greater
void without--so fine a gentleman in such utter disarray that the
angels must have wept his fall.

That Mr William O'Brien did not meet a similar fate was due only to
the fact that he was made of sterner fighting stuff--that he possessed
a more intrepid spirit and a more indomitable will. But the base
weapons of calumny and of viler innuendo were employed to injure him
in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen, to whom he had devoted, in a
manner never surely equalled or surpassed before, a life of service
and sacrifice. _The Freeman's Journal_, whilst suppressing Mr
O'Brien's speeches and arguments, threw its columns open to ruffianly
attacks which no paper knowing his record should have published. In
one of these he was charged with "unnatural services to insatiable
landlordism." He was charged by Mr Dillon and the _Freeman_ with
being actively engaged with Mr Wyndham, Sir Antony MacDonnell and Lord
Dunraven in a plot to break up the Irish Party, and to construct a new
Moderate Centre Party by selling eighteen Nationalist seats in
Parliament to Lord Dunraven and his friends, and he was further
charged with being concerned in a conspiracy having for its object the
denationalisation of the _Freeman_. There were six libels in all,
of so gross a character that Mr O'Brien, since reports of his speeches
were systematically suppressed in every newspaper outside of Munster,
was obliged to take his libellers into court and, before a jury of
their fellow-countrymen at Limerick, to convict them of uttering six
false, malicious and defamatory libels, and thus bring to the public
knowle