BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

First published by SAUNDERS & OTTLEY, in 1 vol. fcap. 8vo. 1861.

New Edition, Revised and Enlarged, post 8vo., issued by LONGMANS, GREEN, & Co., 1871; New Edition, 2 vols. 8vo., March 1903.

PREFACE

THERE comes a period in the lives of most men who have attained any tolerable success in serious literature when the desire to bring their earlier writings to the level of their later knowledge and into full harmony with their matured opinions is perhaps stronger than their desire for fresh production. It is a feeling of this kind which has led me to enlarge, revise, and indeed in a great measure rewrite this book, which has been for many years out of print. Its history is a somewhat curious one. It was first published anonymously in 1861, when the author was just leaving the university. Public opinion on Irish history at that time hardly existed. Scarcely anything of real value on the subject had recently appeared, and my own little book showed only too clearly the crudity and exaggeration of a writer in his twenty-third year. At all events it fell absolutely dead. With the exception of Mr. O'Neill Daunt, who wrote a kindly review of it in a Cork newspaper, and who was good enough to predict for its author some future in literature, I do not know that it impressed anyone. Somewhere about thirty copies were sold, and a few years later, during my absence on the Continent, the publisher having failed, the remaining copies were disposed of, probably for waste-paper.

The subject, however, was one in which I took a deep interest, and in 1871, when another book had brought my name into notice, I carefully revised these biographies, adding a good deal of new information, excising some manifest exaggerations, and toning down a rhetoric which savoured too much of a debating society. With these changes I published it under my own name, and with an Introduction giving my views of the present condition and probable future of Irish affairs. The Irish question had at this time forced itself prominently on English opinion, and two measures of the first magnitude-the disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Church and the Land Act of 1870-had been recently carried. The intensity and extent of disaffection in the country had become manifest to the English public. The Fenian outbreak of 1867 had indeed been speedily and easily suppressed, but the extreme violence of the rebel press and the election of the convict O'Donovan Rossa as member for Tipperary showed how widely the Fenian spirit had spread, while at the same time there was an alarming recrudescence of agrarian crime. The Queen's Speech of 1870 deplored it, and dwelt especially upon the 'remarkable and injurious' 'indisposition to give evidence in aid of the administration of justice.' It was stated in Parliament that in the first half of 1869 the number of agrarian outrages was double the number in the same half of 1868 and four times the number of 1866, and the Land Act of 1870 was accompanied by a Peace Preservation Act containing provisions of the most drastic character. The unsatisfactory state of Ireland was universally acknowledged, although at the

close of 1870 some signs of appeasement appeared, which were attributed by one party to the Land Act and by another to the Peace Preservation Act. In large parts of Ireland, however, and especially in Westmeath and the King's County, little or no improvement was discernible.

Side by side with the symptoms of Fenian disaffection and of agrarian crime, a Home Rule movement of a totally different character had arisen under the leadership of Isaac Butt. It was supported among others by some influential Protestants, who saw with reason in the disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Church a violation of the fundamental article of the Union, and who believed that in the new condition of Irish affairs some form of local government had become advisable. The distinctive features of the modern Home Rule movement had, however, as yet not arisen. Butt was a thoroughly loyal subject of the Empire, and he would have abhorred the idea of allying his party with Fenians or dynamiters. He had no intention of making use of the Irish representation in the House of Commons for the purpose of dislocating parliamentary government in England, and when in his latter days the policy of systematic obstruction was adopted he emphatically repudiated it. He wrote with great knowledge and sagacity on the Irish land question, contending that the two main agrarian wants of Ireland were additional security for tenants' improvements, and such a measure of fixity of tenure as could be attained by the conversion of tenancies at will into long leases extending over some sixty years, and placing the relations of landlord and tenant on the basis of distinct written contract.

He had never, however, the smallest sympathy with the school which afterwards made the agrarian and the Nationalist questions inseparable, preaching the abolition of landlordism, and making the hope of breaking contracts and sweeping away or greatly diminishing rents the main inducement by which they hoped to win the support of the farming class. But a subordinate Parliament constructed on a federal basis, and dealing exclusively with Irish affairs, seemed to Butt imperatively necessary, and he believed that it might arrest or divert the disaffection which was so apparent in Ireland.

My own Introduction did not adopt this view, but it appeared to me that the existing disaffection was in no degree exaggerated. 'Disloyalty,' I wrote, 'is probably as extensive and is certainly as malignant as at the death of O'Connell, and in many respects the public opinion of Ireland has palpably deteriorated. O'Connell taught an attachment to the connection, a loyalty to the Crown, a respect for the rights of property, a consistency of Liberalism, which we look for in vain among his successors; and that faith in moral force and constitutional agitation which he made it one of his greatest objects to instil into the people has almost vanished.'

The material condition of Ireland had of late years incontestably improved and education had widely spread, but there were no signs that disloyalty was in consequence abating, while in some respects it might be plausibly contended that education had even intensified it. The chief reading of the great mass of the people had come to consist of a Fenian press and a cheap literature specially