But the greatest achievement of Parnell was the fact that he had both
the great English parties bidding for his support. We know that the
Tory Party entered into negotiations with him on the Home Rule issue.
Meanwhile, however, there was the more notable conversion of
Gladstone, a triumph of unparalleled magnitude for Parnell and in
itself the most convincing testimony to the positive strength and
absolute greatness of the man. A wave of enthusiasm went up on both
sides of the Irish Sea for the alliance which seemed to symbolise the
ending of the age-long struggle between the two nations. True, this
alliance has since been strangely underrated in its effects, but there
can be no doubt that it evoked at the time a genuine outburst of
friendliness on the part of the Irish masses to England. And at the
General Election of 1885 Parnell returned from Ireland with a solid
phalanx of eighty-four members--eager, invincible, enthusiastic, bound
unbreakably together in loyalty to their country and in devotion to
their leader.

From 1885 to 1890 there was a general forgiving and forgetting of
historic wrongs and ancient feuds. The Irish Nationalists were willing
to clasp hands across the sea in a brotherhood of friendship and even
of affection, but there stood apart, in open and flaming disaffection,
the Protestant minority in Ireland, who were in a state of stark
terror that the Home Rule Bill of 1886 meant the end of everything for
them--the end of their brutal ascendancy and probably also the
confiscation of their property and the ruin of their social position.

Then, as on a more recent occasion, preparations for civil war were
going on in Ulster, largely of English Party manufacture, and more
with an eye to British Party purposes than because of any sincere
convictions on the rights of the ascendancy element. Still the Grand