sooner or later will cause Europe to uprise." Michael Davitt saw this as
clearly in 1878 as Finton Lalor thirty years before. He had matured his
plans in connection with this principle during the weary but not wasted
years of his imprisonment as a Fenian at Dartmoor, a place, the name of
which is connected in America with many odious memories of the second
war between England and the United States; and going out to America
almost immediately after his release on a ticket of leave, he there
found the ideas of Finton Lalor and his associates of 1848, ripened and
harvested in the mind of an American student of sociology, Henry George.
Nowhere in the world has what a shrewd English traveller calls "the
illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in
modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too,
in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the
antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than
in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to
the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress
of this social disease in California; and when Davitt reached America in
1878, Henry George was preparing to publish his revolutionary book on
_Progress and Poverty_, which appeared in 1879. Dates are important from
this point, as they will trace for the reader the formation of the
strongest forces which, as I believe, are to-day at work to shape the
future of Ireland, and, if Cardinal Manning is right, with the future of
Ireland, the future of the British Empire.

The year 1878 saw the "Home Rule" movement in Irish politics brought to
an almost ludicrous halt by the success of Mr. Parnell, then a young
member of Parliament for Meath, in unhorsing the leader of that
movement, Mr. Butt. As the Irish members then had no coherent purpose or
policy, Mr. Parnell had, without much trouble, dominated and brigaded
them to follow him blindly into a system of parliamentary obstruction,