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 Commonwealth. Among them was Thomas Parnell, who migrated to Ireland after the Restoration. He had two sons, Thomas Parnell the poet and John Parnell, who became an Irish judge. From the latter Charles Stewart Parnell was lineally descended in the fifth generation. Sir John Parnell, chancellor of the exchequer in Grattan's parliament, and one of O'Connell's lieutenants in the parliament of the United Kingdom, was the grandson of Parnell the judge. The estate of Avondale was settled on him by a friend and bequeathed by him to his youngest son William (grandfather of Charles Stewart Parnell). His eldest son was imbecile. His second son was Sir Henry Parnell, a noted politician and financier in the early part of the 19th century, who held office under Grey and Melbourne, and after being raised to the peerage as Baron Congleton, died by his own hand in 1842. William Parnell was a keen student of Irish politics, with a strong leaning towards the popular side, and in 1805 he published a pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on the Causes of Popular Discontents,” which was favourably noticed by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. Thus by birth and ancestry, and especially by the influence of his mother, who inherited a hatred of England from her father, Charles Stewart Parnell was, as it were, dedicated to the Irish national cause. He was of English extraction, a landowner, and a Protestant. Educated at private schools in England and at Magdalen College, Cambridge, his temperament and demeanour were singularly un-Irish on the surface—reserved, cold, repellent and unemotional. He appears to have been rather turbulent as a school-boy, contentious, insubordinate, and not over-scrupulous. He was fond of cricket and devoted to mathematics, but had little taste for other studies or other games. He was subject to somnambulism, and liable to severe fits of depression—facts which, taken in connexion with the existence of mental affliction among his ancestors, with his love of solitude and mystery, and his invincible superstitions about omens, numbers and the like, may perhaps suggest that his own mental equilibrium was not always stable. He was as little at home in an English school or an English university as he was afterwards in the House of Commons. “These English,” he said to his brother at school, “despise us because we are Irish, but we must stand up to them. That's the way to treat an Englishman—stand up to him.”

Parnell was not an active politician in his early years. He found salvation as a Nationalist and even as a potential rebel over the execution of the “Manchester Martyrs” in 1867, but it was not until some years afterwards that he resolved to enter parliament. In the meanwhile he paid a lengthened visit to the United States. At the general election of 1874 he desired to stand for the county of Wicklow, of which he was high sheriff at the time. The lord-lieutenant declined to relieve him of his disqualifying office, and his brother John stood in his place, but was unsuccessful at the poll. Shortly afterwards a bye-election occurred in Dublin, owing to Colonel Taylor having accepted office in the Disraeli government, and Parnell resolved to oppose him as a supporter of Isaac Butt, but was heavily beaten. He was, however, elected for Meath in the spring of 1875.

Butt had scrupulously respected the dignity of parliament and the traditions and courtesy of debate. He looked very coldly on the method of “obstruction”—a method invented by certain members of the Conservative party in opposition to the first Gladstone Administration. Parnell, however, entered parliament as a virtual rebel who knew that physical force was of no avail, but believed that political exasperation might attain the desired results. He resolved to make obstruction in parliament do the work of outrage in the country, to set the church bell ringing—to borrow Mr Gladstone's metaphor—and to keep it ringing in season and out of season in the ears of the House of Commons. He did not choose to condemn outrages to gratify the Pharisaism of English members of parliament. He courted the alliance of the physical force party, and he had to pay the price for it. He invented and encouraged “boycotting,” and did not discourage outrage. When a supporter in America offered him twenty-five dollars, “five for bread and twenty for lead,” he accepted the gift, and he subsequently told the story

on at least one Irish platform. In the course of the negotiations in 1882, which resulted in what was known as the Kilmainham Treaty, he wrote to Captain O'Shea: “If the arrears question be settled upon the lines indicated by us, I have every confidence that the exertions we should be able to make strenuously and unremittingly would be effective in stopping outrages and intimidation of all kinds.” This is at least an admission that he had, or could place, his hand on the stop-valve, even if it be not open to the gloss placed on it by Captain O'Shea in a conversation repeated in the House of Commons by Mr Forster, “that the conspiracy which has been used to get up boycotting and outrage will now be used to put them down.”

In 1877 Parnell entered on an organized course of obstruction. He and Mr Joseph Gillis Biggar, one of his henchmen, were gradually joined by a small band of the more advanced Home Rulers, and occasionally assisted up to a certain point by one or two English members. Butt was practically deposed and worried into his grave. William Shaw, a “transient and embarrassed phantom,” was elected in his place, but Parnell became the real leader of a Nationalist party. The original Home Rule party was split in twain, and after the general election of 1880 the more moderate section of it ceased to exist. Obstruction in Parnell's hands was no mere weapon of delay and exasperation; it was a calculated policy, the initial stage of a campaign designed to show the malcontents in Ireland and their kinsmen in other lands that Butt's strictly constitutional methods were quite helpless, but that the parliamentary armoury still contained weapons which he could so handle as to convince the Irish people and even the Fenian and other physical force societies that the way to Irish legislative independence lay through the House of Commons. The Fenians were hard to convince, but in the autumn of 1877 Parnell persuaded the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain (an association founded by Butt, but largely supported by Fenians) to depose Butt from its presidency and to elect himself in his place. He defined his attitude quite clearly in a speech delivered in New York early in 1880: “A true revolutionary movement in Ireland should, in my opinion, partake both of a constitutional and illegal character. It should be both an open and a secret organization, using the constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of its secret combination.” Parnell's opportunity came with the general election of 1880, which displaced the Conservative government of Lord Beaconsfield and restored Mr Gladstone to power with a majority strong enough at the outset to overpower the Opposition, even should the latter be reinforced by the whole of Parnell's contingent. Distress was acute in Ireland, and famine was imminent. Ministers had taken measures to relieve the situation before the dissolution was announced, but Lord Beaconsfield had warned the country that there was a danger ahead in Ireland “in its ultimate results scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine. . . . A portion of its population is attempting to sever the constitutional tie which unites it to Great Britain in that bond which has favoured the power and prosperity of both. It is to be hoped that all men of light and leading will resist this destructive doctrine.” The Liberal party and its leaders retorted that they were as strongly opposed to Home Rule as their opponents, but Lord Beaconsfield's manifesto undoubtedly had the effect of alienating the Irish vote in the English constituencies from the Tory party and throwing it on the side of the Liberal candidates. This was Parnell's deliberate policy. He would have no alliance with either English party. He would support each in turn with a sole regard to the balance of political power in parliament and a fixed determination to hold it in his own hands if he could. From the time that he became its leader the Home Rule party sat together in the House of Commons and always on the Opposition side.

In the government formed by Mr Gladstone in 1880 Lord Cowper became viceroy and Mr W. E. Forster chief secretary for Ireland. The outlook was gloomy enough, but the Gladstone government do not seem to have anticipated, as Peel anticipated in 1841, that Ireland would be their difficulty. Yet the Land League had been formed by Michael Davitt and others in the