Parliament in 1881

Chapter VIII

Parliament in 1881

When I took my seat in the House of Commons in January, 1881, the Irish M.P.’s of note were Biggar, Parnell, Justin MacCarthy, A. M. Sullivan, T. D. Sullivan, Sexton, Dillon, T. P. O’Connor, Arthur O’Connor, M. Marum, Richard Power, Edward Leamy, F. H. O’Donnell, John Barry, E. D. Gray, C. Dawson, James O’Kelly, Dr. Cummins, Q.C., J. A. Blake, O’Gorman Mahon, O’Connor Power, and Lysaght Finegan.

The session began with the announcement of two Coercion Bills, and the arrest of Michael Davitt, who three years earlier had been released by the Tory Government on ticket-of-leave. The Home-Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, recalled Davitt’s licence and sent him back to Portland Prison. Forthwith the Land League determined to transfer its funds to Paris, where its Treasurer, Pat Egan, had already taken the precaution to reside.

To provide a substitute for Davitt as “chief organizer” of the League was urgent, but its executive dared not meet in Ireland. So, in the middle of the struggle against the Coercion Bills, Biggar, Dillon, T. D. Sullivan, James O’Kelly and myself left London for Paris to meet Egan. We stayed at the Hotel Brighton, Rue de Rivoli, kept by an Italian married to an Irishwoman, Ellen Dore. Two members of the Executive, Mat Harris and J. J. Louden, who were not in Parliament, joined us there.

Parnell undertook to attend the following day. Yet he came not, nor sent any tidings to explain his absence. Sunday passed without news of him. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and a second Saturday went by without his coming, or a word of excuse. We saw from the London papers that he had not been attending the House of Commons, and those of us who were M.P.’s felt keenly our non-attendance at Westminster, where the fight against coercion was kept up by Sexton and T. P. O’Connor. Inquisitive pressmen from London came to Paris to try to penetrate the mystery. Our uneasiness became extreme, having waited over a week without news of Parnell. So a conclave was called on the second Saturday night. James O’Kelly, always alarmist, thought he must be either in the Tower or at the bottom of the Thames.

Death, or duress, he declared, alone could explain Parnell’s silence, as our leader would never treat colleagues so scurvily, or neglect Irish interests imperilled in Parliament by Coercion Bills. All inclined to this view, but no one knew how to trace him, or suspected the cause which withheld him from coming. After a long debate I was questioned as to whether I had any letters which would afford a clue to his whereabots. This put me in a quandary.

Parnell had treated me with entire confidence as to his correspondence. I used to open his letters daily, yet of late I had, without a hint from him, reserved for himself packets coming in a woman’s hand. A number of these had accumulated for a fortnight, and I brought them to Paris to give him.

O’Kelly and Egan pressed me as to whether I could produce any letter which would clear up the mystery. I was not a member of the Land League Executive, but Parnell had asked me to accompany its members to Paris, and, at their request, I attended the meeting called to discuss his absence.

I was driven to admit that I held letters which I did not think it right to open, and had brought them over for Parnell himself. They asked had I full authority to deal with his correspondence without reserve, and I said, “Yes.” They next inquired would I break the seal of one of the reserved letters to obtain a clue? I declined. Then they pressed would I deliver one up for their scrutiny?

This was a grave business, and I answered that unless a resolution was passed by them, as the National Executive, I should refuse.

The horrid tradition of Sir James Graham’s opening of Mazzini’s letters was still strong, and the frequency with which the Post Office violated our own correspondence made any infraction hateful to me.

After solemn debate, however, it was proposed, seconded and carried that, in the national interest, I should hand over a letter. I then stipulated that its contents should not be made known to all the members of the Executive, but should be entrusted only to Dillon and Egan. This was agreed to, and I gave Egan an envelope in a female hand, He and Dillon mournfully retired with it to another room while the rest awaited the result. I felt that reasons overmastering obliged them to take this decision, and knew they were solely animated by concern for the cause of Ireland. I was young - not yet twenty-six, and they wielded national authority. Besides, concern for Parnell was uppemost in their minds.

After an interval Egan and Dillon returned gloomily to renew the consultation. They proposed that Biggar and I should start for London by the first train next morning to search for Parnell at an address in Holloway taken from the letter.

Biggar copied this in a notebook, but the opened letter I refused to take back. O’Kelly, with general assent, declared that on reaching London we should set ex-detectives Druskovitch and Micklejohn to trace Parnell.

We agreed to make the journey, and after midnight the meeting dissolved in dismay. Next morning Biggar and I set forth on a chilly Sunday to catch an early train about 7 a.m. With chillier hearts we left the hotel for the Gare du Nord. As our cab reached the street from the courtyard it was crossed by another wherein sat Parnell!

Biggar crowed, “There’s Charles!” and rejoiced. We told our driver to go back, and reached the door of the hotel as Parnell mounted hastily to a room.

I ran upstairs and knocked at his door. He half opened it, with a look of surprise as if nothing had happened to trouble us, and snarled - to baffle inquiry - “What do you want?”

I had come fresh from the incidents of the previous night to make him aware of what had happened, and said, “I’m glad to see you. We were anxious about you.” Without reply he closed the door in my face. It was his only act of rudeness in all our relations.

Thhat evening Parnell, having slept through the day, met his and presided over their deliberations. No explanation of his absence came, nor was any apology tendered to men whose had been lacerated and whose time had been wasted. Towards myself he was profuse in courtesy and good humour.

At the conference Dillon was appointed Chief Organizer consequent on the arrest of Davitt. He went to Dublin to make defiant speeches while we got back to Westminster.

The breaking open of the letter so upset me that I told Parnell next day in the Tea-room of the House of Commons I could not continue as his secretary. I made the excuse that the work was heavy, and that I needed time for legal studies. I promised to find him a good substitute.

He was cordial and friendly, and thanked me for past help, evidently wishing to atone for his sharpness in Paris.

The decision of politicians, torn with distress, to open Parnell’s letter should not be ‘harshly judged. His chief partisan, James O’Kelly, was foremost in demanding it. After the Split of 1890, Parnell unjustly blamed Dillon, for though Dillon, like others, acquiesced in O’Kelly’s suggestion, he was governed solely by a sense of duty. No one sought knowledge of an intrigue.

Parnell’s opponents after the Split never revealed or made use of the incident, though ruthlessly attacked, and confined themselves solely to the publicly known facts of the O’Shea case as the root of trouble.

Parnell never reproached me for obeying the order of the Land League Executive to hand over the letter. Our relations remained as cordial as every - until the Galway Election of 1886. His delay and dalliance had smoothed the Government’s task at Westminster in enacting the Arms Bill and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus.

After I resigned my honorary post as Parnell’s secretary, I heard that Biggar sent a friend (without consulting me) to the address in Holloway disclosed in Paris where the forlorn lady lodged. I reproached Biggar with this intrusion, but he argued that he feared a scandal might break out if her applications for help were left unanswered.

She was “Lizzie from Blankshire,” and was found in a barely furnished garret, in bed with a baby. A likeness of Parnell (cut from the Dublin Weekly News) was pinned to her counterpane. Though in want, she was staunch to the father of her child, and never let fall a complaint. Her needs were provided for, and she was told where to apply should she require further help. This she never did, so Parnell must have made amends for his temporary neglect.

T. P. O’Connor’s Life of Parnell, page 133 (published in 1891), says: ” It speaks volumes for the reticence and delicacy which (in spite of all their supposed garrulousness and the brutality sometimes of their political controversy) really distinguish Irishmen that this fact was never communicated for years afterwards by the men who knew it, even to their intimate and close friends in the same Party; and that the vast majority of the members of the Party never heard of it at all.” The mystery of Parnell’s absence from Paris had no relation to Lizzie, for he had then taken up with Mrs. O’Shea, whose name was unknown to us at that time,

One incident of the Paris visit annexed by a colleague for a different setting should be related here.

While we were waiting for Parnell, Mat Harris afforded comic relief. On the Sunday before his arrival Mat and I walkedthe Boulevards in a foggy frost, cursing his neglect. Suddenly Matt asked could I get him a glass of whiskey. I steered for the Cafe de la Paix as a likely venue, but no whiskey was then stocked there. I told this to Mat, and proposed brandy. He grumbled, but ordered a “fine champagne.” The waiter poured out a tot into a tiny liqueur glass, to Mat’s wonderment. “What’s that?” he asked. “Fine champagne, monsieur.” Mat, glass in hand, surveyed him. Disdaining its insignificance, he threw off its contents, but muttered to the Frenchman, “No wonder the Prussians licked ye!”

William O’Brien assigns this incident to 1890.

Mat was a power in Connaught, and possessed a flow of humour. We youngsters sat at his feet as a veteran to hear him discourse of old times. He once proclaimed, as we pastured on soda and milk, while he drank punch in the Imperial Hotel, Dublin: “I’d rather be at my own humble fireside in Ballinasloe after my third tumbler of punch, than drinking soda and milk in the best hotel in Europe!”

In January, 1890, from his deathbed, when Biggar passed away, Mat wrote me a letter of condolence as Joe’s closest friend. Its end was: “I foresee that Biggar’s loss portends a great misfortune to the Irish Cause.”

The “Split “took place ten months later. The hackneyed lines recurred to me afterwards:

‘Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,

And coming events cast their shadows before.”

A day or two after we returned from Paris I suggested to Parnell the name of a new secretary. He accepted my recommendation, so I fetched from Newcastle-on-Tyne Henry Campbell, to whom I had taught shorthand in 1877. At first Parnell, who had never heard of Campbell, was dissatisfied and, despite the help I gave him for weeks, opposed his retention. Experience, however, showed Campbell’s merits, and Parnell confided in him afterwards more intimately in his predecessor. Although a Catholic, Campbell joined the Freemasons in London while Parnell was in prison to try to help him. He was initiated on the 27th April, 1882, in Skelmersdale No.1658. After his Chief’s death he became Town Clerk of Dublin, and rejoined the Order there. He was knighted for his services to the Dublin Corporation by Lord French.

I heard Gladstone pay Sir Stafford Northcote, leader of the Opposition 47 years ago, the compliment that he was “the best private secretary I ever had.” Northcote blushed, but hardly with pleasure. A tribute of praise from me to Campbell -  “a youngster thrust suddenly into an almost incomprehensible situation, which he handled with tact - may be paid by his old teacher.”

I recall these facts because T. P. O’Connor, unaware of them, wrote in the Daily Telegraph of 10th March, 1924:

“Healy … was the most necessary secretary to the most necessitous principal that ever existed. Everybody thought that the association thus formed was lifelong, but something happened in America that produced some disagreeable impression in Parnell’s mind, and he did not employ Mr. Healy again. It was a decision which, in time, was to bring tragic consequences, especially to Parnell.”

That the author of t his believed it to be true is clear from the fact that, in the Sunday Times of 21st August, 1921, he wrote:

“Tim Healy has all his life been a splendid shorthand writer; he conducts all his private and family correspondence, I believe, still in shorthand. He was also a brilliant writer, and while he was still a secretary he used to write a weekly letter to an Irish paper; it was this letter that helped Parnell very seriously in his first beginnings - which were very difficult, and met with enormous opposition from very powerful influences in Irish life…

I don’t know why, but he and Parnell had some difference of opinion In America, and Parnell never employed Mr. Healy as his secretary again-an incident that led to mighty consequences to Parnell, to Mr. Healy, and to Ireland.”

I was never “employed” by Parnell nor got a shilling from him. My letters herein published disclose everything I received from the National Organization. I had no “difference” with him in America, and continued to act for Parnell for a year after our return. That I opposed Parnell after the Divorce case of 1890 for something that did not happen in 1881 is improbable!

The only tiff (if it can be so called) which I had with Parnell, until the Galway Election of 1886, was in June, 1881, on a private member’s Bill to abolish Capital Punishment. He asked me to support it, but I refused, saying I was in favour of hanging murderers. Parnell smiled, and we went into opposite lobbies. On our return to the House he sat beside me and gently murmured, “Healy, you’ll live to be hanged yet for that vote.” I replied gaily, “Well, if so, I shall deserve it.”

During our enforced stay in Paris O’Kelly took me to see Henri Rochefort of L’Intransigeant and got a hearty greeting. Rochefort shouted for Olivier Pain to join in the welcome. Pain afterwards got lost in the Sudan.

O’Kelly and I lodged together in London, and after our return he wished to take Parnell again to Paris. I protested against the folly of withdrawing him from Westminster. To no avail, for before the dawn broke O’Kelly woke me to say “goodbye.” I renewed my plea that the Commons and not the Boulevards was Parnell’s post of duty, and as I heard O’Kelly’s footfalls clatter down the stairs I thought they thudded defeat on the coffin of the Irish Cause.

The second visit was, forsooth, to see Victor Hugo, but the poet could do nothing for Ireland, and we were disgusted at our leader’s neglect of things that mattered. He gave racy interviews to the French Press, then deserted O’Kelly and returned to Mrs.O’Shea - having invented a new “cover” for absenting himself from Parliament. The Freeman took its part in the camouflage.

In 1883-4 O’Kelly became Daily News correspondent in Egypt, but Kitchener stopped him at, Wadi Halfa and he had to go back to London. This was years before Fashoda.

Parnell gave O’Kelly a dinner at the Grand Hotel, then newly opened, to soften his return. We waited long for Sexton to join us, but he sent a telegram saying sore eyes prevented his going out. At that moment he was strolling up the Strand past the Grand Hotel to dine at a modest restaurant.

O’Kelly had been London correspondent of the New York Herald, and in his journalistic wanderings was condemned to be shot by the Spaniards in Cuba as a spy. He had served in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria, and told me that once he debated within himself, when placed as a sentry over Moorish prisoners, whether he would shoot them if they tried to escape, but resolved that if they did he would act as a Frenchman.

Years later Gladstone asked me why O’Kelly introduced General Boulanger to the Gallery of the House of Commons and entertained to dinner. He feared that this was offensive to the French Government and might prejudice Ireland. O’Kelly explained that Boulanger was his old commander in the Foreign Legion, and Gladstone being told this commended him to me for showing hospitality an old Army chief, but asked why the Press had not been given the reason. Gladstone, having taken up Home Rule, had a mind large enough, and minute enough, to absorb every point that could help Ireland or shield her from hurt.

O’Kelly’s early denunciations of the House of Commons led Gladstone to retort prettily. Bemoaning the ill opinion O’Kelly held of Parliament, Gladstone, in broken accents, breathed a prayer that, weighty as was his judgment, he ventured to entertain the hope that, having regard to the position the House occupied in the history of human liberties, it would not be upon an opinion such as O’Kelly’s, however well considered, that its fame in the mind of posterity “would - in the main - ultimately depend.” The thrust was the keener because the Government knew, as we did, that O’Kelly became an American citizen on 12th October, 1876. The archness of Gladstone and his balanced phrases, were enjoyed by all who loved drollery.

One night when we we oppsoed a vote on Irish Local Government as a protest against the removal of the Catholic chaplain from the Donegal workhouse by a Tory Board of Guardians, O’Kelly exploded. Having exhausted our big guns, we had been driven to spur him into action. He was a halting orator, and began, “Mr. Speaker, sir, with regard to the destitution of the paupers of Dunfanaghy workhouse,” Forster jeered, and we whispered,” Donegal! James.” Yet he began again, “Mr. Speaker, sir, with regard to the terrible case of the spiritual destitution of the paupers in the Dunfanaghy Union.” We murmured, “Donegal! James, Donegal!” He, however, repeated a third time, “Mr. Speaker, sir, with regard to the spiritual destitution of the inmates of Dunfanaghy Union.” “Donegal! James,” we shouted, “Donegal!” Thereupon he roared at the Speaker, “G--- damn it, sir, these fellows won’t let me speak a d--- word!” and sat down.

Mr. Speaker pretended not to hear him, as he seldom troubled the House.

O’Kelly used to dwell on the treatment inflicted on Jerome Collins - the pioneer (if not the discoverer) of weather forecasts - on board the Jeannette, which the New York Herald sent to the Arctic regions. Collins’s prophecies of storms were at first greeted by jokes in the Press. Then the Hull fishing fleet defying the New York Herald warnings, went to sea and was wrecked. Weather -prophets now are as common as broadcasters (or blackberries).

O’Kelly told me that Collins on a bitter snowy day in London in the ‘seventies, after years of wandering, descended on the New York Herald office in Fleet Street. He seemed icebound in an ulster sheeted with frost, but shrilled out the Munster greeting, “A fine raw day, glory be to God!” The staff laughed him a welcome.

Other discoveries than that of Collins went unregarded at first in the “so-called nineteenth century.”

In 1876 The Times published a statement from the chief engineer of the London G.P.O. that telephones could never be more than a toy, and had no commercial value. On my uncle’s book-shelves in Fermoy there lay a catalogue of the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851 which declared that the breech-loading rifle might have some little value for sporting purposes, but would be useless in war. When Prussia defeated the Danes in 1864 by the needle-gun this did not wake up Europe. Only on the collapse of Austria, when in 1866 Sadowa crashed upon the fool-experts, were the armies of the world weaponed with breech-loaders.

In 1898 Marconi brough his instruments to the Terrace of the House of Commons on the day Gladstone died. The House had adjounred. He could then barely signal across the Thames. His shares were quoted only on the Dublin Stock exchange. The price stood at 5s., and Dunlops were 6s. London would not touch them, as it disbelieved in de Lesseps’s power to cut the Suez Canal in the ‘sixties.

Incredulity of an opposite kind became known to me in 1885-6. A group of American speculators went to Paris to tell the Press and public that it was impossible for de Lesseps to complete the Panama Canal. They wanted to “bear” its shares. Their story was true, but they could not break the confidence of the French in their great engineer, who had “fixed” the Press, including, the Colon correspondent of The Times, who proclaimed that the undertaking was certain of success. So the “bears” returned to New York heavy losers by their charitable adventure! The shares were largely owned by the cabbies and cooks of Paris, who could not be shaken out of their holdings.

When we returned from Paris the Liberals were flushed with triumph. They had carried the Coercion Bills, and appeared a solid body. On the Front Bench sat Gladstone, Bright, Chamberlain, Bannerman, Forster, Mundella, Dilke, Trevelyan, Harcourt, Sir H. James, and Sir R. Herschell, Noting their strength I remarked to Biggar,” That’s a powerful Government.” “Not at all, mister,” he retorted. “That’s merely a row of jealous individuals!”

In 1881 Mr. Peel was appointed to succeed Speaker Brand, and during one of Biggar’s speeches cautioned him several times. We could tell by the way Peel’s hand moved along the arm of his chair when he was about to strike. As Biggar proceeded it became clear that the Speaker would suspend him if a chance offered. Biggar, however, was watchful. In a fling at Chief Secretary Forster he said, “He isn’t as brave in Ireland as he is in this House. Here he struts about like a cock on his own …” Peel’s hand stretched forth like the arm of fate, but before he could rise, a roar of laughter burst out as Biggar finished with “homestead, sir!” This quaint twist saved him from suspension.

On a Saturday in 1881 Forster, to pass an Irish Relief Bill, kept the House sitting all day and into the night. To scandalize the Scottish constituents of Mr. Gladstone in Mid-Lothian, we refused to allow it to go through until after midnight, hoping to rouse the “unco’ guid” on the desecration of the Sabbath. (There was no closure until 1883.) At half-past twelve on Sunday we let the Bill pass and the remaining orders of the day were reached. Amongst them was the Sunday Closing (Ireland) Bill. Though not in charge of that measure, I got up and solemnly moved its second reading. Without appreciating the joke Phil Callan called a “count,” and every one disappeared except Biggar and myself. The Serjeant-at-Arms, Gossett, being old, could not understand Biggar’s sticking beside me, as he and Joe had hatched many “countrs” together. So he left his chair in anger and, advancing to the Bar, shouted (contrary to all propriety), “Biggar, Biggar, come out, come out!” Joe as loudly responded, ” It’s all right, Serjeant, they’re not 40!” The Speaker, astonished at the outburst, cried sternly, “Order! Order!” I laughed so loudly that the pressmen craned their necks from the gallery to look down.

Not one of them, however, mentioned the Serjeant’s slip in Monday’s papers.

In February, 1881, John Redmond resigned his post in the Bill Office of the House of Commons when the borough of New Ross fell vacant.

Parnell was persuaded to accept him, and he was returned unopposed. Twenty years later Redmond published a collection of speeches which hardly do justice to his powers. He shone by incisiveness and clarity in presentation of facts.

In 1883 he stated the case of a dismissed police inspector named Murphy in a way which, for cogency and mastery of evidence, was unsurpassed. After Parnell’s death in 1891, he forsook the Bar for the less lucrative calling of politics, and though surrounded by partisan advisers, his speeches in a nine years’ struggle were seldom marred by the adoption of their suggestions.

During the session of 1881 a stranger called on me in the lobby who had been a guest at Barry’s in Manchester when I stayed there as a lad in 1872. This was Edmond O’Donovan, son of John, the famous Gaelic scholar. When I met him in 1872 he had just returned from the Carlist War in Spain. Before that, he served with the French Foreign Legion in 1870 as Lieutenant Eliot, and was taken prisoner by the Germans at Orlans. He was as learned a man as his father, though not in Celtic lore.

The father left him in wardship to Under-Secretary Larcom, of Dublin Castle, of whom Sir Robert Peel, when Chief Secretary, being asked how Ireland was governed, replied, “It’s governed by Mr. Larcom and the police.” Larcom failed to annex O’Donovan to Castle interests, and jailed him as a suspect in 1867. When I met him in 1872 I inferred that he was organizer for the I.R.B. for the North of England. Arthur Forrester, who often called at Barry’s to meet him, then was organizer for Southern England. Forrester had also served in the French Foreign Legion in 1870-1 under Bourbaki. To a lad of 17, as I was, their adventures rivalled those of Sindbad the Sailor.

O’Donovan carried an Arabic grammar under his arm, and in and trains studied it as a preparative for Eastern pursuits. He took me to the top gallery of a theatre in Manchester to see Henty Irving, who was beginning to acquire fame in The Belis. I asked O’Donovan afterwards what he thought of the play. Fresh from the French and Carlist battlefields, he broke out, “Absurd and unreal! Would any man show such remorse for merely killing one Polish Jew?”

He used to tell stories of McGahan, the correspondent of the New York Herald, whose accounts of the Bulgarian atrocities in 1877 roused Gladstone’s emotions and led to the emancipation of Bulgaria. McGahan now is honoured with a statue in Sofia. Further East according to O’Donovan, more interesting experiences of McGahan began. The Sheikh of a tribe fighting against the Russians gave him valuable information, and grew so fond of him that he proposed to marry him to his daughter. “I dared not refuse,” McGahan said, “so on the eve of the wedding, as I had wife in New York, I stole a camel and made off.” “Oh!” quoth O’Donovan, “the New York Herald would have expected better from you than that!”

O’Donovan became a Daily News correspondent in 1884, and was killed at El Obeid, below Khartoum, with Hicks Pasha.

Forrester was a writer of ballads, one of which, “The Felons our Land,” was widely sung. In 1918, 50 years after its publication, a London Hebrew got six months from a court-martial in the West of Ireland for chanting it.

O’Donovan came to me in 1881 to the House of Commons to say he had travelled to Merv, where, as “Ichtiar Bahadur Khan,“he was one of a trio that checked the Russian advance. He wanted an introduction to Lord Granville, Foreign Secretary. I gasped, and inquired why. He replied that if he could get 100,000 rifles into Merv he would defeat Russia’s designs in Asia. I smiled, but having no relations with the Foreign Minister, refused him a letter.

Later I was told that O’Donovan penetrated Downing Street, where the officials thought that an ex-Fenian was not a man to be trusted. Edmond, however, honestly sought to save Merv.

I asked him what he had done for its people. He answered proudly, “I taught them the two essentials of civilization - the arts of manufacturing gunpowder and whisky!”

His book on Merv brought him £1,000. In 1884 it led Frank Power, a reporter on the Freeman (nicknamed Ghazi) to accompany him to the Sudan. Each vowed never to desert the other while money lasted. A festivity at Constantinople led to their being arrested for words against Sultan Abdul Hamid. But for the British Ambassador they would never have reached Egypt.

General Gordon was then at Khartoum, and when they arrived there O’Donovan and Power became his guests. Power remained with Gordon, but O’Donovan set out with Hicks Pasta for Kordofan. In a letter to the Daily News in the autumn of 1884 he prophetically depicted himself impaled on a” Sudanese spear the size of a shovel.”

Hicks Pasha’s Egyptians were cut to pieces by the Mahdi, and with them perished Edmond, son of John O’Donovan, the Gaelic genius.

Father Oberwalder, who was imprisoned by the “prophet” after the capture of Khartoum, speaks of retrieving O’Donovan’s mackintosh from the battlefield. The choice of such raiment for a rainless desert sums up its owner.

After O’Donovan was killed Power wrote amusing letters from Khartoum to his friends on the Freeman. Gordon, on his evidence, shot four sheikhs who were supposed to have betrayed him when he was battling to repel the Mahdi’s onset. Power’s pluck was undoubted, but not his accuracy. I should not have accepted any story he told without corroboration, knowing that in 1881 he assured Parnell and his employer, E. D. Gray of the Freeman, that be had been shot at and wounded in a skirmish with “extremists” at Clontarf.

Gray got a surgeon to examine him, and Parnell told me the “wound” was a boil. Yet he persisted that “rebels” were marching on Dublin.

Before the fall of Khartoum, Power telegraphed to The Times announcing that he had been appointed by Gordon “Consul-General for the Sudan.” London was amazed, and Dublin chuckled.

Sir E. D. Wolff, in the House of Commons, asked Gladstone who Power was. Irish members swallowed their mirth when the” Grand Old Man replied, “I understand he is a considerable Sudanese merchant.” If Power could have heard this it would have cheered his last moments.

Gordon speaks somewhere of Power’s presenting him with a copy of The Imitation of Christ. Power’s letters from Khartoum to friends on the Freeman would not suggest that he had packed the volume in his portmanteau/ He was killed on the Nile before Gordon met his fate.

William Redmond made an onslaught on the War Office for its failure to give a pension to Power’s sisters, and kept the House of Commons going all night until a promise of an annuity was wrung from Childers, Secretary of War.

Power’s sisters had not been on speaking terms with him for years, and suffered no financial loss by his death.

He was no relation of O’Connor Power, M.P. - a much abler man. Lord Oxford and Asquith in his last book mistakenly attributes to O’Connor Power the famous saying of Colquhoun of South Carolina, that his opponents were like mules, having “neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.” Its application to the Unionists was made by another Irish member.

Ireland’s parliamentary representation then was mostly drawn from like material. .

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