hand. This document implied at least condonation of the Phoenix Park
murders.

Other letters equally incriminating were published. Parnell denied the
authorship, his denial was not accepted; fierce controversy ended in the
establishment of one of the strangest Commissions of Enquiry ever set
up--a semi-judicial tribunal of judges. Its proceedings created the
acutest public interest, drawn out over long months, up to the day when
Sir Charles Russell had before him in the witness-box the original
vendor of the letters--one Pigott. Pigott's collapse, confession of
forgery, flight and suicide, followed with appalling swiftness: and the
result was to generate through England a very strong sympathy for the
man against whom, and against whose followers, such desperate calumnies
had been uttered and exploited. Parnell's prestige was no longer
confined to his own countrymen: and the sense of all Home Rulers was
that they fought a winning battle, under two allied leaders of
extraordinary personal gifts.

Then, as soon as it was clear that the attack of the Pigott letters had
recoiled on those who launched it, came the indication of a fresh
menace. Proceedings for divorce were taken with Parnell as the
co-respondent: the case was undefended. Mr. Gladstone and probably most
Englishmen expected that Parnell would retire, at all events
temporarily, from public life, as, in Lord Morley's words, "any English
politician of his rank" would have been obliged to do. Parnell refused
to retire; and Gladstone made it publicly known that if Parnell
continued to lead the Irish party, his own leadership of the Liberal
party, "based, as it had been, mainly on the prosecution of the Irish
cause," would be rendered "almost a nullity." The choice--for it was a
choice--was left to the Irish. To retain Parnell as leader in