ordeal. Fenianism was not killed. But the infamies inflicted upon the Fenian convicts stamped the purpose of Fenianism upon the very nature and being of hundreds of thousands of Irishmen throughout the world.

THE RESUSCITATION OF FENIANISM.

The loathsome punishment inflicted upon so many scholars, soldiers, and gentlemen who had attempted to carry out the maxim of the leading English journal, that "Liberty is a serious game, to be played out, as the Greek told the Persian, with knives and hatchets, not with drawled epigrams and soft petitions," produced the most widespread consequences in all classes of the people. The physical insurrection of Fenianism had collapsed, and if the Government had imitated the wise clemency which had been extended to the Mitchells, the Smith O'Briens, the Gavan Duffys of 1848, the spirit of Irish disaffection, disappointed with failure and cowed with ridicule, might again have rested for twenty years. The horrible atrocity of the torturing indignities perpetrated upon the Fenian prisoners operated the moral resurrection of Fenianism. It was felt that it was Irish nationality itself which was sought to be degraded, that it was Irish nationality, the nationality that had survived 3,000 years of glory and sorrow, which was sent to recruit the chain-gangs and to bear the ordure buckets of English convict hells. The Amnesty Agitation suddenly leaped to light and popularity, and collected upon the same platforms, along with notorious sympathizers with the I.R.B., crowds of merchants, priests, and moderate politicians, who had held sternly aloof from the doctrines of the Irish People and the Circles and Centres of the crushed conspiracy. An indescribable passion filled and overflowed all hearts. University students and Trinity College dons shuddered with repulsion and indignation as they thought of the fate of the high-minded and scholarly Luby. A wide circle of personal friends was touched to scalding grief over the woes of the gentle enthusiast Charles Kickham, deaf and half blind, in the felon's uniform and the felon's revolting company. The great county of Tipperary elected, however illegally, by an overwhelming vote, O'Donovan Rossa, against whose name no charge was yet writ except a defiant bearing and a rebel's heart. Mass meetings, rivalling in their proportions the monster assemblages of Repeal, took place all over the country. And while the multitudes expressed commiseration and anger over the sufferings of the political prisoners, they learned to appreciate the motives that had swept so many men of high promise and good repute into the schemes which had collapsed so readily, and which were being punished so infamously. Shaken by the pressure of the movement, shaken still more in all probability by the stirrings of the English popular conscience, which is so often more wise than the English political head, the Government of Mr. Gladstone-the first Gladstone

Cabinet-began to give way, but, hampered by official traditions, only adopted the stupid and miserable expedient of partial and piecemeal amnesty, under the insulting guise of the revocable ticket-of-leave.

Abominable revelations had already leaked out of the well-kept secrecy of penal servitude. The first batches of released prisoners corroborated the worst details of the disgusting story. English penal servitude has its horrors for the English felon, no matter how depraved. What was it for the Irish gentleman who had dreamed of imitating Louis Kossuth and George Washington? The amnesty movement became the expression of a sullen hate in the breasts of millions, and long before Michael Davitt was released in order to become the founder of the Land League, and long before Charles M'Carthy was released to expire a broken and tortured wreck in the arms of those who would have welcomed his restoration to life and freedom, the diabolical policy of degrading Irish disaffection to common felony and outrage had done fearful work from Manchester and Dublin to New York and San Francisco.

John Mitchell, in his "Jail Journal”—that marvellous piece of English prose, of which the like is not often to be found even in the magnificent literature of England-was able to write that, nominal felon though he was, he was allowed to spend his time in authorship and study. He chafes at fortune. He "gets on but slowly in his translation of the Politeia."" Different, desperately different, were the privations inflicted on Mitchell's successors after another quarter of the enlightened nineteenth century had been added to the past; and I would warn the statesmen of England to examine their consciences whenever they have to do with an Irish rebel who has passed through the Inferno into which the Fenian prisoners were plunged.

FROM PORTLAND TO PHILADELPHIA,

The Home Rule movement was the resultant of many forces, but few men attained importance upon its platform who had not given pledges to the amnesty cause. Home Rule was and is-if new coercion will allow it to survive-a constitutional movement which always enjoyed the loud disdain of the professors of the faith of '98 and '67. The rise of the Land League Agitation was facilitated by the popular impression produced by the incorrigible insensibility of the Imperial Parliament to every form of Irish Constitutional demand so long as it continued to be merely constitutional. Mr. Isaac Butt had nevertheless won over several Fenians to his constitutional experiment.

The Land League rallied many of the leaders and the overwhelming bulk of the rank and file of the Fenian Nationalist party. time, undoubtedly, the united forces of the Irish race at home and abroad stood at the disposal of the Land League directors, if they had known what to do with them. All classes, with few exceptions, of

the Irish people seemed taken with the fascinating simplicity of the Land League programme. The loud announcement that the land was to be henceforth "for the people" was declared to be infinitely superior to the halting views of the Tenant Righters, who had never been able to dispose of the various interests of landlords, farmers, and labourers in so expeditious a fashion. The surprising prediction of Mr. John Dillon, one of the most popular of the new chiefs, that the Land League Members of Parliament would prevent the passing of any coercion Act, was accepted as so much obvious and necessary truth. The proud declaration of Mr. Parnell that he would never "have taken off his coat" for land reform if self-government was not behind it, filled up the measure of popular hope and exultation. Every good thing was to be obtained for Ireland, as the phrase went, "without a blow."

The new agitation enjoyed the practical monopoly of the popular journals of Ireland. By relationship or by purchase the entire weekly press was affiliated to the Land League. At the same time, the Nationalist newspapers in the United States were secured by means equally efficacious. A number of representatives of the League had been sent on various missions to the American Irish, and the IrishAmerican press gladly accepted the pliant pens of such popular characters for the supply of political and Parliamentary correspondence; and the ready writers did not fail to do ample justice to the exploits of themselves and their intimates without the slightest fear or contradiction or correction.

There were Fenian sceptics, however. Mr. James Stephens, from his Parisian retreat, occasionally expressed huge scorn at the theory that British oppression was to be dissipated by perpetual motions to report progress, or the violated treaty to be reintegrated by a steady strategy of all-night sittings. Mr. John O'Leary kept up a running commentary of carping observations, which the young and eloquent writers of Lower and Middle Abbey Street dismissed as simply illnatured. Recently there has been a tendency in many IrishAmerican quarters also to attach a less implicit faith to the best advertised orations of Dublin Ciceros, and even Mr. Parnell's remarkable explanation of the no-rent manifesto has been criticised in the columns of the New York Irish Nation, with a trenchant vigour which does not leave much unsaid :

"Mr. Parnell's speech at Cork," writes the journal of Mr. John Devoy, ❝contains a very interesting passage in reference to the no-rent manifesto. We learn from it that the leader of the Irish party 'never supposed that the policy of no rent would do more than effect good indirectly by enabling tenants to obtain large abatements from the landlords under pressure of the threat to pay no rent.' He is satisfied that the policy was signally justified by the results, although the struggle undoubtedly involved the sacrifices and sufferings of some individuals.' . . . . The manifesto advised the farmers to pay no rent whatever, under any circumstances, until the Government

abandoned its policy of terrorism. One single effort, it told them, would suffice to abolish landlordism; the campaign of a single winter would strike down the ancient enemy for good. There was not one word in the document about bargaining for reductions with the landlords; not one word about yielding when the tenant was pushed to the wall; on the contrary, the manifesto distinctly advised the farmers to allow themselves to be evicted. It promised that the funds of the Land League should be poured out unstintedly for their support. . . . . What must those farmers now think who obeyed the manifesto to the letter, and allowed themselves to be turned out of house and home? They immolated themselves and their families in the full faith that their trusted leaders believed what they were saying when they promised the abolition of landlordism in return for the acceptance of their solemnly uttered counsels. It does not need much imagination to fancy their feelings when they learned that the authors of the manifesto did not believe what they said, and did not even expect that their advice would be taken. . . . The 'some individuals' whose sufferings and sacrifices were referred to in the Cork speech must have felt very bad indeed. It would be easy to make a parallel between the Cork speech and the Kilmainham manifesto, which would be very disagreeable reading for the authors of the latter document." It is not surprising after this castigation of the gentlemen "who chalked up no rent and then ran away," that Mr. John Devoy spoke of a projected convention of the Land League as "the meeting of a society much thinned in numbers and prestige, and no more.'

The failure of the Land League to fulfil its most confident engagements, the diminished activity of the Land League members in Parliament, even as an irritating element, the exasperation caused by coercion, the refusal of further remedial legislation to amend the acknowledged deficiencies of the Land Law Act, and perhaps above all the operation of the so-called Pinch-of-Hunger policy, have unquestionably brought violent methods of overt revolution into increased favour with numbers of Irishmen at home and abroad. I have no reason to believe that the atrocious expedient of destructive explosions in the midst of peaceful populations, whether of mixed nationality or of purely English blood, has any following except among a handful of desperadoes, whose very nature seems to have been transformed by the debasing experience of the British convict jails. But the increasing indecision which Mr. Parnell has latterly displayed, has raised doubts beyond. the Atlantic as to his possession of a policy-doubts which his indisposition to meet the Philadelphia Convention has not removed. A period of unrest and passion, of menacing talk and popular perturbation has set in, and the immense number of Irish who are actuated by no grateful feelings towards the British Government will render the crisis a troublesome if not a dangerous one. I confess I see few traces as yet of any tendencies, however, which should alarm with the sense of a real peril the adherents of the existing connection between Great Britain and Ireland. The utter ignorance of the resources, the policy, the strong points and the weak points of the Imperial system, which is the most marked characteristic of American-Irish disaffection, may lead to many impossible propositions, but to no

serious undertaking. In these islands there is no combination of secret conspirators which could permanently resist the dissolvent and disruptive influences of the powers of arrest on suspicion and private examination before a Juge d'instruction that are always within the reach of the authorities, ever since the Phoenix Park murders and the dynamite discoveries swept away the best prepossessions on behalf of more equitable procedure. There is and there will remain a misgoverned and discontented Irish people in Ireland. There is and there will remain a hostile and menacing Irish population in America, but there is more than "a silver streak" which separates the discontent of Ireland from the co-operation of America. At the same time, the student of Anglo-Irish history may usefully remember that the closing quarters of centuries appear to be fatal periods in the relations. between the English and the Irish, ever since the accession of the house of Tudor at any rate. At the close of the fifteenth century the native Irish had barely left the English Pale a strip on the eastern sea-coast. At the close of the sixteenth century the insurrection of O'Neill and O'Donnell had carried the red hand and the conquering cross to the shores of South Munster. The battle of the Boyne and the violated treaty of Limerick darken the closing annals of the seventeenth century. The last years of the eighteenth century are filled with the loud tramp of the volunteers and the horrid butchery of 1798. May justice and wisdom now avert the omens which were ushered in by the passing of a Coercion Act of unexampled severity -lashing a nation for James Carey's crime-in the centenary year of the British recognition of Irish legislative independence.

FRANK HUGH O'DONNELL.

WE have received letters from intimate friends of Professor Zöllner indignantly denying Dr. de Cyon's statement that he "died mad," and asking us to publish this contradiction. M. von Weber writes: "I know that he was until his last hours of life in the most healthy state of mind."

The conductors of this REVIEW cannot issue this number without expressing their deep regret at the sudden death of their valued Sub-Editor, Mr. William Gellan. Intelligent, laborious, devoted, he brought to his task not only the accuracy of a practised eye, but a well-cultivated critical judgment. He was connected with the REVIEW almost from its foundation, he rendered to it faithful and important service, gaining the esteem not only of those whom he assisted, but of many of its distinguished contributors; and he died in harness, full of zeal for the work which he loved and which was so suddenly taken out of his hands.