what has
come, even in Ireland, to be called "Parnellism," and he good-naturedly
persisted in speaking of our host last night and of his friends as
"mugwumps." For the "mugwumps" of my own country I have no particular
admiration, being rather inclined, with my friend Senator Conkling (now
gone to his rest from the racket of American politics), to regard them
as "Madonnas who wish it to be distinctly understood that they might
have been Magdalens." But these Irish "mugwumps" seem to me to earn
their title by simply refusing to believe that two and two, which make
four in France or China, can be bullied into making five in Ireland.
"What certain 'Parnellites' object to," said one of the company, "is
that we can't be made to go out gathering grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles. Some of them expect to found an Irish republic on robbery, and
to administer it by falsehood. We don't."[27] This is precisely the
spirit in which Mr. Rolleston wrote to me not long before I left England
this week. "I have been slowly forced," he wrote, "to the conclusion
that the National League is a body which deserves nothing but
reprobation from all who wish well to Ireland. It has plunged this
country into a state of moral degradation, from which it will take us at
least a generation to recover. It is teaching the people that no law of
justice, of candour, of honour, or of humanity can be allowed to
interfere with the political ends of the moment. It is, in fact,
absolutely divorcing morality from politics. The mendacity of some of
its leaders is shameless and sickening, and still more sickening is the
complete indifference with which this mendacity is regarded in Ireland."

It is the spirit, too, of a letter which I received not long ago from
the west of Ireland, in which my correspondent quoted the bearer of one
of the most distinguished of Irish names, and a strong "Home Ruler," as
saying to him, "These Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of
moral sense as the Bushmen of South Africa."

This very day I find in one of the leading Nationalist journals here
letters from Mr. Davitt, Mr. O'Leary, and Mr. Taylor himself, which
convict that journal of making last week a statement about Mr. Taylor
absolutely untrue, and, so far as appears, absolutely without the shadow
of a foundation. These letters throw such a curious light on passing
events here at this moment that I shall preserve them.[28] The statement
to which they refer was thus