Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/499

 divorce court against Parnell. Davitt had been led by Parnell to believe that the suit brought by William Henry O'Shea [q. v. Suppl. II] was another conspiracy, destined to the same collapse as the Pigott forgeries. He resented Parnell's mis-representation, and immediately flung himself into the campaign against Parnell's leadership. He had just started 'The Labour World' (first number, 21 Sept. 1890) to be the organ of the labour movement in Great Britain, which was on a fair way to success, but was ruined by Davitt's attitude towards Parnell, and by his personal absorption in the political struggle. The paper lived only till May 1891. Davitt had many times declined a seat in parliament, but he now yielded to the urgencies and needs of the anti-Parnellite party, and in the end of 1891 contested Waterford City against Mr. John Redmond, the leader of the Parnellites after Parnell's death. Defeated here, he was elected for North Meath at the general election of 1892, and was promptly unseated on petition, owing to the use in his favour of clerical influences which he had done his best to stop. The priests whose conduct had led to the petition made no attempt to save him from the consequences, and Davitt became bankrupt. In 1895 he went on a lecturing tour in Australia, and returned home to find himself M.P. for two constituencies, East Kerry and South Mayo; he chose to sit for South Mayo. He was not a parliamentary success, but was always listened to with respect, especially on prison reform, a subject he had long made his own. In 1897 he visited the United States to stop the projected Anglo-American Alliance; his active work was mainly responsible for the rejection of that year's Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty by the United States Senate. In 1898 he helped Mr. William O'Brien to found the United Irish League, an organisation which brought about the reunion of the Parnellite and anti-Parnellite sections. On 25 Oct. 1899 he dramatically withdrew from parliament as a protest against the Boer War. Early in 1900 he went to South Africa in a capacity partly journalistic and partly diplomatic; he held the threads of a plot to bring about European intervention on behalf of the Boers a plot which broke down because of the hesitancy at a critical moment, and the subsequent death, of Colonel de Villebois Mareuil, who was to have led the French contingent. Davitt fiercely attacked the Dunraven conference report on the land question (1903) and the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of the same year, the purchase terms of which he regarded as a surrender of much that had been gained by the twenty-five years' agitation that he had started. Temporarily overborne by Mr. William O'Brien, he had the satisfaction of seeing, in little over a year, a complete revulsion of feeling in the Nationalist party with regard to Mr. O'Brien's policy. In 1903-4-5 he paid, mainly as the representative of American journals, three visits to Russia, where his sympathies were with the revolutionary party. At the general election of 1906 he devoted himself to supporting the labour party in England, and helped to secure many of their notable victories. The last months of his life were occupied with a struggle over the English education bill, on which he fell foul of the catholic clergy. The Irish Press having been closed to his letters advocating secular education, he was contemplating the establishment of a weekly paper, to express strongly democratic as well as nationalist views, when he caught cold after a dental operation. Blood poisoning set in, and he died in Dublin on 31 May 1906. He was buried in Straide, co. Mayo, where the 'Davitt Memorial Church' has been erected. His wife survived him with five sons and one daughter. A portrait by William Orpen is in the Dublin Gallery of Modern Art. Another was painted by Mr. H. J. Thaddeus.

Davitt stood for the reconciliation of extreme and constitutional nationalism; although he never wavered, as his latest writings show, from the ultimate idea of an independent Ireland he abandoned at an early stage all belief in those methods of secret conspiracy and armed rebellion which are generally associated with the separatist ideal. His notions of constitutional agitation were, however, always permeated by the vigour of his early revolutionary plans. He also stood for the harmonising of democracy and nationality. With his whole-hearted nationalism he combined from early life a growing conviction that any thoroughgoing regeneration of government and society in Ireland, and indeed throughout the world, must rest on a socialistic basis. In his collectivist, as in his anti-clerical, views he differed from most of the Irishmen with whom he was politically associated. His political affinities inclined to industrial and secularist democracy. Hie strength of character, disinterestedness, and steadiness of purpose won him the personal respect even of those who held his doctrines to be erroneous or pernicious.