persons whom, after myself, they most concerned.
I have been more annoyed by the delay than by the trouble thus entailed
upon me; but I shall be satisfied if those who may take the pains to
read the book shall as nearly as possible see what I saw, and hear what
I heard.
I have no wish to impress my own conclusions upon others who may be
better able than I am accurately to interpret the facts from which these
conclusions have been drawn. Such as they are, I have put them into a
few pages at the end of the book.
It will be found that I have touched only incidentally upon the subject
of Home Rule for Ireland. Until it shall be ascertained what "Home Rule
for Ireland" means, that subject seems to me to lie quite outside the
domain of my inquiries. "Home Rule for Ireland" is not now a plan--nor
so much as a proposition. It is merely a polemical phrase, of little
importance to persons really interested in the condition of Ireland,
however invaluable it may be to the makers of party platforms in my own
country, or to Parliamentary candidates on this side of the Atlantic. It
may mean anything or nothing, from Mr. Chamberlain's imperialist scheme
of four Provincial Councils--which recalls the outlines of a system
once established with success in New Zealand--to that absolute and
complete separation in all particulars of the government of Ireland from
the government of Great Britain, which has unquestionably been the aim
of every active Irish organisation in the United States for the last
twenty years, and which the accredited leader of the "Home Rule" party
in the British Parliament, Mr. Parnell, is understood in America to have
pledged himself that he will do anything to further and nothing to
impede. On this point, what I took to be conclusive documentary evidence
was submitted to me in New York several years ago by Mr. Sheridan, at a
time when the fever-heat of British indignation excited by those murders
in the Phoenix Park, for which I believe it is now admitted by the best
inform
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