ignant
methods of defamation as Parnell, and it is questionable how far the
Divorce Court proceedings were not intended by his enemies as part of
this unscrupulous campaign. Replying to a letter of William O'Brien
before the trial, Parnell wrote: "You may rest quite sure that if this
proceeding ever comes to trial (which I very much doubt) it is not I
who will quit the court with discredit." And when the whole mischief
was done, and the storm raged ruthlessly around him, Parnell told
O'Brien, during the Boulogne negotiations, that he all but came to
blows with Sir Frank Lockwood (the respondent's counsel) when
insisting that he should be himself examined in the Divorce Court, and
he intimated that if he had prevailed the political complications that
followed could never have arisen. On which declaration Mr O'Brien has
this footnote: "The genial giant Sir Frank Lockwood confessed to me in
after years: 'Parnell was cruelly wronged all round. There is a great
reaction in England in his favour. I am not altogether without remorse
myself.'"

Not all at once were the flood-gates of vituperation let loose upon
Parnell. Not all at once did the question of his continued leadership
arise. He had led his people, with an incomparable skill and
intrepidity, not unequally matched with the genius of Gladstone
himself, from a position of impotence and contempt to the supreme
point where success was within their reach. A General Election, big
with the fate of Ireland, was not far off. Was the matchless leader
who had led his people so far and so well to disappear and to leave
his country the prey of warring factions--he who had established a
national unity such as Ireland had never known before? "For myself,"
writes William O'Brien, "I should no more have voted Parnell's
displacement on the Divorce Court proceedings alone than England would
have thought of changing the command on the eve of the battle of
Trafalgar in a holy horror of the frailties of Lady Hamilton and her
lover."

The Liberal Nonconformists, however, shrieked for his head in a real
or assumed outburst of moral frenzy, and the choice thrust upon the
Irish people and their representatives was as to whether they should
remain faithful to the alliance with the Liberal Party, to which the
Irish nation unquestionably stood pledged, or to the leader who had
won so much for them and who might win yet more if he had a united
Ireland behind him, unseduced and unterrified by th