of the so-called "Parliamentary" action of the Irish Nationalists.


II.

The visits to Ireland, of which this book is a record, were made on my
return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of
His Holiness Leo XIII. What I then and there learned convinced me that
the Vatican was on the eve of grappling in Ireland with issues
substantially identical with those which were forced, in my own country,
two years ago, upon a most courageous and gifted member of the American
Catholic hierarchy, the Archbishop of New York, by the open adhesion of
an eminent Irish American ecclesiastic, the Rev. Dr. M'Glynn, to the
social revolution of which Mr. Henry George is the best-equipped and
most indefatigable apostle. Entertaining this conviction (which events
have since shown to have been well-founded), I was anxious to survey on
the spot the conditions under which the conflict so vigorously
encountered by the Archbishop in New York must be waged by the Vatican
in Ireland.

To suppose that the Vatican, in dealing with this conflict, either in
Ireland or in America, is troubling itself about the balancing of
political acrobats, British or American, upon the tight-rope of "Home
Rule," is as absurd as it would have been to suppose that in 1885 the
Vatican concerned itself with the subterranean intrigues which there is
reason to believe the Irish Nationalists then sought to carry on with
the wire-pullers of the two great British political parties. To get a
correct perspective of the observations which I came from Rome this year
to make in Ireland, my readers, as I have already said, must allow me to
take them across the Atlantic, and must put aside as accessory and