Gladstone-Parnell, and the great Irish struggle. A graphic story of the injustice and oppression inflicted upon the Irish tenantry, and a history of the gigantic movement throughout Ireland, America and Great Britain for "home rule," with biographies of the great leaders

Front matter

^•^ANP;fTH : E' -

I

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Introduction

1HAVE pleasure in writing- a few lines of preface to Mr. T. P. O'Connor's volume. I know no one who is better fitted to present the case of Ireland, and especially the history of our movement, before the public of America. His vigorous and picturesque pen makes everything he writes lucid, interesting, and effective ; and he has had the advantage of himself taking a prominent and honorable part in many of the scenes he so graphically describes. I believe it especially desirable to have our case properly stated to the American public at the present moment. No Irishman can speak too warmly of the extraordinary assistance that America has rendered to the cause of Ireland. The financial and moral support which our movement has received from the Great Republic has been recognized by eminent English Statesmen as an entirely new factor in the present movement, and as giving it g INTRODUCTION.

a strength and a power of endurance absent from many previous Irish efforts. It is at moments of crisis like the present, when other political parties face the expense and difficulties of a political campaign with hesitation and apprehension, that one really appreciates the enormous position of vantage in which American generosity has placed the Irish party. Then the unanimity of opinion both among the statesmen and the journalists of America has done much to encourage men like Mr. Gladstone, who are fighting for the Irish cause, and to fill Ireland's enemies with the grave misgiving that the policy condemned by another great and free nation may not be sound or just. For these reasons we are all especially desirous that American opinion should be made acquainted with the merits and facts of this great controversy, and the following pages are eminently calculated to perform that good work.

Charles Stewart Parnell.

London, August, 1886.

A. BURNS, D. U., LL. D.

CANADIAN INTRODUCTION.

BY A. BURNS, D. D., LL. D.,

President Wesleyan Female College, Hamilton, Ont. Canada.

THE following pages cover one of the most interesting periods in Irish history. The story related falls mainly within the memory of most of its readers, embracing scarce the last two decades.

It is written by a university man of scholarly attainments, a brilliant journalist and author, one who, although comparatively a young man yet, is fairly entitled to say of most of the struggles and scenes he describes, quorum pars magna Jul

The book may be taken as a representative putting of the great struggle now going on, and as such it may fairly claim the attention of all interested in the peace and prosperity of Ireland. None need be told that that land is now unhappy and somewhat disaffected. Her harp is on the willows, her songs are threnodies. Yet no one can become acquainted with her children without discovering that naturally they are cheerful, lighthearted and hopeful. Nor can you give to one of them a cup of cold water without waking a genuine inborn gratitude. Whether at home or abroad, the race is hopeful, grateful, and essentially patriotic. A kind word jr deed for Ireland will brighten the eye, quicken the pulse, arouse the enthusiasm, and win the affection of her children the world over.

Have her critics furnished an adequate explanation of the present unhappy condition of such a people ? The passionate outbursts of her outraged sons receive due prominence. Her agrarian crimes are published far and wide. Bid: few pre candid enough to admit that the crimes of Ireland are chiefly agrarian, and caused by the wholesale confiscation of her soil, and the struggles of the descendants of the real owners to regain the lands of their fathers. Goldwin Smith tells us "an alien and absentee proprietary is the immediate source of her troubles." " The ownership of land in that country is itself the heritage of confiscation, and of confiscation which has never been forgotten. The struggle is in fact the last stage of a long civil war between the conquered race and an intrusive proprietary, which was closely identified with the political ascendency of the foreigner, and the religious ascendency of an alien creed." " The districts where agrarian violence has most prevailed have been singularly free from ordinary crime. The Irish farmer has clung desperately to his homestead, eviction is to him destitution." "The crime (of the Irish) is solely agrarian. In the districts where it has been most rife, even in Tipperary itself, ordinary offences have been very rare," and he continues, "justice requires that we remember the training which the Irish as a nation have had, and of which the traces are still left upon their character. In 1 798 they were goaded into open rebellion by the wholesale flogging, half-hanging, pitch-capping and picketing which were carried on over a large district by the yeomanry and militiamen, who, as soon as the suffering masses began to heave with disaffection, were launched upon the homes of the peasantry."

Irish history is little studied. Few even of my countrymen know anything of the history of our country. A partial excuse may be found in the fact that even in the schools of Ireland the history of the country is not found. Only as it may be considered necessary to explain English history is Ireland ever mentioned, and neither in common school -nor in university have the children of Ireland the faintest opportunity to learn anything of their people, or the causes of the disaffection so generally prevalent. Traditions abound, but they are generally on sectarian lines, and theological bitterness, the worst of all, is usually added to political.

The story that follows will be found real history, the history of our own times. Every page will revive the memory of the stirring scenes of the last decade or two, and as a panoramic vision will fix in the mind the cause of events that had well-nigh passed from us forever.

This work will be found exceedingly opportune. Mr. Gladstone's bill for Home Rule in Ireland has been defeated at Westminster, and again by the people of England, because, as we verily believe, it was not understood by the British people, while it was grossly misrepresented by those whose interests are at war with the enlargement of popular rights.

The following pages will show the emptiness and absurdity of the war cries of the late conflict — " The Empire in Danger," " The Union in Danger," "Protestantism in Danger" — all echoes of the Disestablishment Conflict of 1868, the recollections of which ought to have taught the pseudoprophets wisdom and moderation. There never was a measure more grossly caricatured than the late bill for the relief of Ireland. It was all in vain that the leaders of Irish thought had declared both with pen and voice that " the proposed Irish Parliament would bear the same relation to the Parliament at Westminster that the Legislature and Senate of every American State bear to the head authority of the Congress in the capitol at Washington." All that relates to local business it

CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. J 3

was proposed to delegate to the Irish Assembly; all questions of imperial policy were still to be left to the imperial government. It was all in vain that the acknowledged Irish leader, Mr. Parnell, declared in the closing debate that the Irish people were content to have a Parliament wholly subordinate to the imperial Parliament ; that they did not expect a Parliament like Grattan's, which possessed co-ordinate powers. The words of some outraged exile in America or Australia furnished a sufficient pretext for the ungenerous but characteristic vote that followed.

In this great struggle I am thoroughly in sympathy with my country. With the historian Lecky I believe that " the Home Rule theory is within the limits of the Constitution and supported by means that are perfectly loyal and legitimate." The British Colonies have secured it, and it is not too much to say that the bond of union between the Colonies and the Empire depends on its existence. Canadian opposition to Home Rule would seem to show that the denial of the boon implies also the rejection of the Golden Rule.

That permanent peace will ever come to Ireland without it no sane man expects. No foreign power can govern Ireland. The experiment has surely been tried long enough. The unconquerable spirit possessed so fully by the larger island is no less developed in Ireland. The spirit of the age only strengthens the spirit of independence, while the millions of her children on this side the Atlantic tell her that Home Rule is the only reasonable rule for freemen.

Ireland needs rest. For a long time she has been under terrible provocation, and has suffered as no other country in Europe. She looks around for sympathy, and L is not wanting. But what she needs most is equitably yea, generous treatment at the hands of England. These pages will show that her poverty is largely the result of misgovernment. England needs the tranquillity of Ireland as much as Ireland herself does. Let Ireland be assured that her rights are to be sacredly respected ; that her wrongs are to be redressed by England, not grudgingly nor of necessity; that the elevation and comfort of her down-trodden children is to be considered a more pressing subject of legislation than the claims of an independent and irresponsible nobility. She has given her Burkes, her Wellingtons, her Dufferins and her Tyndalls to enrich the Empire. Let her be told to call her children to the development of her own resources and the improvement of her own polity. Order will then soon come from chaos, and light from her sadly prolonged darkness, and the days of her mourning- will soon be ended.

Thoroughly satisfied that a generous policy on the part of England, not merely permitting, but

CANADIAN INTRODUCTION. jg

encouraging Home Rule, would give to my country peace, prosperity, and enthusiastic loyalty, I take my place with those who plead for a separate Parliament for Ireland, as Illinois, Ohio, and California have separate Parliaments, but still allied to the Imperial Parliament on the principle that binds Illinois, Ohio, and California to the United States of America. Less than that should not be accepted. More has not been asked by any of the leaders sketched in this work.

I commend the work to the reader not because I can endorse every sentence that it contains, or approve of all the details of operation therein, for I have not studied carefully every page. But I heartily approve of the object aimed at, and believing that the present struggle is the old contest of monopoly against the common weal, or, as it has been aptly put recently, of " the classes against the masses," I promptly take my place with the latter, and claim for my countrymen a respectful hearing.

As in all past struggles for the enlargement of British liberties the terms "loyal" and "disloyal" have been called into active service, so it is to-day, and " Unionists " and " Loyalists " are posing as the legitimate opponents of Home Rule. These pretensions and assumptions have been torn into tatters a thousand times, and are as meaningless when so used as the terms "orthodox" and "heterodox" among speculative theologians.

And as we scan the ranks of the men who on either side of the Atlantic are the self-constituted representatives of loyalty, and monopolize the term, we instinctively ask Risum teneatis ? Some, I admit, may honestly see in Home Rule the dismemberment of the Empire and innumerable other evils. But I am firmly convinced that there are a thousand thousand good hearts and true, who, like myself, see in Home Rule and its concomitant legislation not merely harmony and prosperity to Ireland, but an immeasurably brighter future and a more permanent stability to the British Empire.

A. Burns.

Chapter I

Charles Stewart Pamell — His character for grip arid grit — His talents ■ — His appearance — His early life and education — His ancestry — Admiral Charles Stewart — Parnell's first tour in America — The Manchester Martyrs — Parnell's entrance into political life — Isaac Butt and the earlier movements for Home Rule — Parnell and Butt — Joseph Gillis Biggar — Enormous salaries paid to officials in Ireland — The policy of obstruction — Parnell's first speech in the House of Commons 25

Chapter II

The era of obstruction — The British House of Commons — Queen's speech — The vote on supplies — How obstruction helped Ireland's cause — A happy hunting-ground — Flogging in the army — England's treatment of prisoners—The Mutiny Act — Making John Bull listen — The Transvaal bill — The Irish in England and Scotland — The Famine of 1879 — A crisis in Ireland's history — Mr. Butt's defects as a leader — Michael Davitt — The story of his early years — A Fenian movement — Davitt in prison — A ticket-of-leave — Irish-American organizations — Land League — " The Three F's " 7 8

Chapter III

The land war — The struggle of seven centuries — Illustrations from Irish history — Coin and livery — The wars under the Tudor dynasty — Feudal tenure — The Munster undertakers — The settlement of Ulster — The Commission of Inquiry — The perfidy of the Stuarts — Cromwell 111 Ireland — William III., Sarsfield, Limerick, and the Penal Code . . . . . . . .120

18 CONTENTS.

Chapter IV

The destruction of Irish industries — An alien proprietary — English legislation for many years directed against Ireland's prosperity — Interference with Irish trade — The depopulation of the land — Woollen manufactures crushed out — Blow after blow dealt at nascent industries — Lord Dufferin on English jealousy of Ireland — Rack-renting, eviction and legalized robbery — Cruelties of the landlords — Dean Swift's pictures of Ireland in the eighteenth century — Beggary and starvation . . . . . -159

Chapter V

The story of Irish Parliament — Poyning's law — Molyneux's " Case of Ireland Stated " — Wood's Half- Pence — The condition of Catholics — The corruptions of the Anglo-Irish Parliament — The Irish Volunteers — The convention at Dungarvan — Grattan's Declaration of Rights — An independent Irish Parliament — Its happy effect on Irish industries and on business in general — Lord Fitzwilliam recalled — The rebellion of 1798 — Castlereagh — How the Union was brought about . . . . 177

Chapter VI

After the Union — Ireland heavily taxed for England's benefit — Shameful injustice — The degradation of the tenantry — Absenteeism — Wholesale eviction — Coercion acts — Worse and worse — Wrong, poverty and hopeless misery — Catholic Emancipation — O'Connell the Liberator — The attitude of the Orange Tory party — O'Connell in Parliament ....... 226

Chapter VII

The great famine of 1845 — Only the culmination of evils — The potato-rot — The great struggle in England regarding the Corn-Laws — Protection versus Free Trade — Peel and repeal — Lord John Russell — His criminally stupid Irish policy and its bitter consequences — Tenant right the only remedy for Ireland's woes — Coercion as a cure for famine — The awful disasters of 1845 an & 1847 — Foolish doctrinaire policy of Russell — The Labor Rate act — The Fever — The Soup Kitchen act — Emigration — Death of O'Connell — Young Ireland — John Mitchel and Smith O'Brien — Great Britain the unchecked mistress of Ireland . . . 254

CONTENTS. 19

Chapter VIII

Resurrection — The Fenian movement — Gladstone's mental and moral characteristics — The disestablishment of the Irish Church — The Land Bill of 1870, and its fatal defects — The Home Rule movement originally started by Protestants — The Home Rule Association — A complete change of policy — No favors to be asked or accepted from either great English party . . . 289

Chapter IX

The old fight again — The crisis of 1879 — The election of Mr. Parnell as chairman of the Irish party — Defects of Mr. Shaw as a political leader — The leaders decide to remain in opposition to both English parties — Mr. Shaw's friends sell themselves for place and pay — The hopeless differences between the Irish party and the English Liberals — Parnell's platform for settling the Irish land problem — English incapacity to deal with Irish questions — The Disturbance Bill — Forster — Irish outrages — Irish members suspended and ordered to leave the House — Land Bill of 1881— No-Rent cry 308

Chapter X

In the depths — Merciless war between the Irish people and the authorities — Forster and Clifford Lloyd — " Harvey Duff" — Parnell imprisoned — Parnell triumphant — The Phoenix Park murders — Conservative rule and its benefits — Gladstone's new movement for conceding Home Rule — The situation in January, 1886 345

Chapter XI

The great Home Rule debate of 1886 — Gladstone, the Grand Old Man — His appearance — His qualities of mind and heart — John Morley — Joseph Chamberlain — Mr. Goschen — Hartington — Salisbury — Churchill — Justin McCarthy — Thomas Sexton — Arthur O'Connor — Timothy Daniel Sullivan — James O'Kelly — His singular and checkered career as soldier, journalist, politician and parliamentarian — John Dillon — Edmund Leamy — E. D. Gray — T. M. Healy — William O'Brien — J. E. Redmond — T. Harrington — The Liberal Parliament of 1886 — Gladstone's grand speech — The debate — Hope again deferred 362

20 CONTENTS.

Chapter XII

The appeal to the country — Gladstone's popularity with the masses — His brilliant campaign in Scotland — Splendid receptions at Manchester, Liverpool, and elsewhere — Anti-Gladstonian efforts of Hartington, Chamberlain, Goschen, Churchill, Trevelyan and Bright — The Primrose League — The attitude of the agricultural laborer and the farmer — The democracy almost unanimously friendly to Ireland— The result of the midsummer elections of 1886 — Ireland not crushed — The revival of hope — Belfast riots — The outlook to-day 445

Chapter XIII. The Movement In America

Parnell's Appeal to America — Founding of the Irish National League of the United States — The Buffalo Convention — The " No-Rent Manifesto" — The Chicago Convention — The League's Second National Gathering — Gloomy days for the League — End of the Land League of America — Birth and growth of the Irish National League of America — Hon. Alexander Sullivan's administration — The emigration question — Irish-American leaders — Patrick Egan takes the reins — Dark days again dawn for the League — Public utterances of eminent Americans — To strengthen Gladstone's hands — Third Annual Convention of the National League — The League under John Fitzgerald's administration . 471

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE {Steel) Frontispiece,

THOMAS POWER O'CONNOR s

A. BURNS, D. D., LL. D 8

CHARLES STEWART PARNELL (Steel) 24

ISAAC BUTT — J. G. BIGGAR 53

JOHN DILLON — GEO. J. GOSCHEN 57

J. WAITE 7I

LORD R. CHURCHILL — LORD HUNTINGDON 75

LORD SPENCER — MR. TREVELYAN 83

MICHAEL DAVITT 97

F. B. FREEHILL

SCENE IN IRELAND — FARMER'S CABIN „,

RT. HON. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN „ s

EVICTED — DRIVEN FROM THE HOUSE WE BUILT 131

W. REDMOND — J. E. REDMOND , 47

CELEBRATING MASS IN A CABIN

LIFE IN IRELAND

DESTITUTE FISHERMEN ,„

EVICTED — HOMELESS j8 3

HENRY GRATTAN l8g

GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 2 oi

DANIEL O'CONNELL 24g

DRINKING HIS HONOR'S HEALTH 259

THE OBNOXIOUS PROCESS-SERVER 2g3

NO RENT.

T. M. HEALY — JOHN GEORGE McCARTHY 313

MEETING OF LAND LEAGUE COMMITTEE .". 321

SOLICITING AID 329

LORD SALISBURY — Mr. FORSTER 333

22 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JOHN MORLEY— SIR. W. V. HARCOURT 339

A. M. SULLIVAN — T. D. SULLIVAN 403

GLADSTONE'S SPEECH 437

PARNELL'S NEW NATIONAL MAP 442

ROBERT M. McWADE 469

PATRICK A. COLLINS — THOMAS FLATLEY 47 o

PATRICK EGAN — ALEXANDER SULLIVAN 475

JAMES MOONEY — JOHN J. HYNES 476

REV. PATRICK CRONIN — JOHN F. FINERTY 509

REV. CHARLES O'REILLY, D. D. — REV. THOMAS J. CONATY 510

WILLIAM J. GLEASON — HON. M. V. GANNON 545

REV. DR. GEO. C. BETTS — REV. P. A. McKENNA 546

COL. JOHN F. ARMSTRONG — PATRICK MARTIN 603

MICHAEL J. REDDING — MILES M. O'BRIEN 604

JAMES REYNOLDS — JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY 613

COL. W. P. REND — JOHN GROVES 614

ROGER WALSH — O'NEILL RYAN 651

JOHN FITZGERALD — JOHN P.SUTTON 652

REV. GEO. W. PEPPER — THOMAS H. WALSH 759

M. J. RYAN — E. JOHNSON 7C0

Chapter I. Charles Stewart Parnell

GRIP and grit : in these two words are told the secret of Mr. Parnell's marvellous success and marvellous hold over men. When once he has made up his mind to a thing - he is inflexible ; immovable by affection or fear or reasoning. He knows what he wants, and he is resolved to have it. Throughout his career he has often had to make bargains ; he has never yet been known to make one in which he gave up a single iota which he could hold. But it takes time before one discovers these qualities. In ordinary circumstances Mr. Parnell is apparently the most easy-going of men. Though he is not emotional or effusive, he is genial and unaffected to a degree ; listens to all comers with an air of real deference, especially if they be good talkers ; and apparently allows himself to follow implicitly the guidance of those who are speaking to him. He is for this reason one of the most agreeable of companions, never raising any difficulties about trifles, ready to subject his will and his convenience to that of others ; amiable, unpretending, a splendid listener, a delightful host. But all the softness and the pliancy disappear when the moment comes for decisive action. After days of apparent wavering, he suddenly becomes granite. His decision is taken, and once taken is irrevocable. He goes right on to the end, whatever it may be. In some respects, indeed, he bears a singular resemblance to General Grant ; he has his council of war, and nobody could be a more patient or more respectful listener, and, ordinarily, nobody more ready to have his thinking done for him by others. But when affairs reach a great climax, it is his own judgment upon which he acts, and upon that alone.

Mr. Parnell has not a large gift of expression. He hates public speaking, and avoids a crowd with a nervousness that sometimes appears almost feminine. He likes to steal through crowded streets in a long, heavy Ulster and a small smoking-cap that effectually conceal his identity, and when he is in Ireland is only happy when the quietness of Avondale secludes him from all eyes but those of a few intimates. From his want of any love of expressing himself, it often happens that he leaves a poor impression on those who meet him casually. More than one man has thought that he was little better than a simpleton, and their mangled reputations strew the path over which the Juggernaut of Parnell's fortunes and genius has mercilessly passed. He is incapable of giving the secret of his power, or of explaining the reasons of his decisions. He judges wisely, with instinctive wisdom, just as Millais paints ; he is always politically right, because, so to speak, he cannot help it. This want of any great power and any great desire to expose the line of reasoning by which he has reached his conclusions has often exposed Parnell to misunderstandings and strong differences of opinion even with those who respect and admire him. The invariable result is that, when time has passed, those who have differed from him admit that they were wrong and he right, and once more have a fatalistic belief in his sagacity. Often he does not speak for days to any of his friends, and is seldom even seen by them. He knows the enormous advantage sometimes of pulling wires from an invisible point. During this absence his friends occasionally fret and fume and wonder, whether he knows everything that is going on ; and, when their impatience has reached its climax, Parnell appears, and lo ! a great combination has been successfully laid, and the Irish are within the citadel of some timehonored and apparently immortal wrong. Similarly it is with Parnell's nerve. In ordinary times he occasionally appears nervous and fretful and pessimistic; in the hour of crisis he is calm, gay, certain of victory, with the fanaticism of a Mussulman, unconscious of danger, with a blindness half boyish, half divine.

Mr. Parnell is not a man of large literary reading, but he is a severe and constant student of scientific subjects, and is especially devoted to mechanics. It is one of his amusements to isolate himself from the enthusiastic crowds that meet him everywhere in Ireland, and, in a room by himself, to find delight in mathematical books. He is a constant reader of enoineerincr and other mechanical papers, and he takes the keenest interest in machinery. It is characteristic of the modesty and, at the same time, scornfulness of his nature, that all through the many attacks made upon him by gentlemen who wear their hearts upon their sleeves, he has never once made allusion to his own strong love of animals ; but to his friends he often expressed his disgust for the outrages that, during a portion of the agitation in Ireland, were occasionally committed upon them. He did not express these sentiments in public, for the good reason that he regarded the outcry raised by some of the Radicals as part of the gospel of cant for which that section of the Liberal party is especially distinguished. To hear a man like Mr. Forster refusing a word of sympathy, in one breath, for whole housefuls of human beings turned out by a felonious landlord to die by the roadside, and, in the next, demanding the suppression of the liberties of a nation because half-a-dozen of cattle had their tails cut off; to see the same men who howled in delight because the apostle of a great humane movement, like Mr. Davitt, had been sent to the horrors of penal servitude, shuddering over the ill-usage of a horse, was quite enough to make even the most humane man regard this professed love of animals as but another item in the grand total of their hypocrisy. Mr. Parnell regards the lives of human beings as more sacred than even those of animals, and he is consistent in his hatred of oppression and cruelty wherever they may be found. His sympathies are with the fights of freedom everywhere, and he often spoke in the strongest terms of his disgust for the butcheries in the Soudan, which the Liberals, who wept over Irish horses, and Irish cows, received with such Olympian calm. In 1867 the ideas that had been sown in his mind in childhood first began to mature. His mother was then, as probably throughout her life, a strong Nationalist, and so was at least one of his sisters. Thus Mr. Parnell, in entering upon political life, was reaching the natural sequel of his own descent, of his early training, of the strongest tendencies of his own nature. It is not easy to describe the mental life of a man who is neither expansive nor introspective. It is one of the strongest and most curious peculiarities of Mr. Parnell, not merely that he rarely, if ever, speaks of himself, but that he rarely, if ever, gives any indication of having studied himself. His mind, if one may use the jargon of the

Germans, is purely objective. There are few men who, after a certain length of acquaintance, do not familiarize you with the state of their hearts or their stomachs or their finances ; with their fears, their hopes, their aims. But no' man has ever been a confidant of Mr. Parnell. Any allusion to himself by another, either in the exuberance of friendship or the design of flattery, is passed by unheeded; and it is a joke among his intimates that to Mr. Parnell the being Parnell does not exist.

It is plain from the facts we have narrated that Parnell's great strength is one which lies in his character rather than in his attainments. Yet his wonderful successes won in the face of numerous and most bitter opponents testify to mental abilities of a very high order. Mr. Gladstone has said of him, " No man, as far as I can judge, is more successful than the hon. member in doing that which it is commonly supposed that all speakers do, but which in my opinion few really do — and I do not include myself among those few — namely, in saying what he means to say." Mr. Parnell is moreover very strong in not saying the thing which should not be said. Too many of his countrymen, it may be safely asserted, are of that hasty and impulsive temperament which may betray, by a word prematurely spoken, some point which should have been held from the enemy, and which might easily have been made, at some later time, a stronghold of defence in the parliamentary contest. Mr. Parnell has few qualities which have hitherto been associated with the idea of a successful Irish leader. He has now become one of the most potent of parliamentary debaters in the House of Commons, through his thorough grasp of his own ideas and through his exact knowledge of the needs of his country. But Mr. Parnell has become this in spite of himself. He retains to this day, as we have before stated, an almost invincible repugnance to public speaking ; if he can, through any excuse, be silent, he remains silent, and the want of all training before his entrance into political life made him, at first, a speaker more than usually stumbling. His complete success in overcoming, not indeed his natural objection to public speaking, but the difficulty with which his first speeches were marked, affords one of the many proofs of his wonderful strength and singleness of purpose.' It is not a little remarkable that his first successful speech was criticised for its vehemence and bitterness of tone, and for the shrillness and excessive effort of the speaker's voice. It seems probable that the embarrassing circumstances of his position while addressing an unsympathizing body of legislators, combined with a sense of his own inexperience, may have produced. the appearance of excessive vehemence of manner.