conduct of Queen Victoria during the famine of 1847, and by his foolish
attacks upon the management and objects of the Duchess of Marlborough's
fund for the relief of Irish distress. The friends of Mr. Davitt in
America, however, and the leaders of the most active Irish organisations
there, came to the rescue, and as the two American parties were
preparing their lines of battle for the Presidential conflict of 1880,
Mr. Parnell was not only "put through" the usual course of "receptions"
by Mayors and State legislatures, but invited on an "off-day" to address
the House of Representatives at Washington. His tour, however, on the
whole, harmed more than it helped the new Irish movement on my side of
the Atlantic, and when he was called back to take his part in the
electoral contest precipitated by Lord Beaconsfield's dissolution of
Parliament at Easter 1880, Mr. Davitt went out to America himself to do
what his Parliamentary associate had not succeeded in doing. During this
visit of Mr. Davitt to the United States, Mr. Henry George finally
transferred his residence from San Francisco to New York, and made his
arrangements to visit England and Ireland, and bring about a practical
combination between the advocates of "the land for the people" on both
sides of the ocean. These arrangements he carried out in 1881-82,
publishing in 1881, in America, his treatise on the Irish Land question,
while Mr. Davitt, who had been arrested after his return to Europe by
Mr. Gladstone's Government in February 1881, on a revocation of his
ticket-of-leave, lay a prisoner at Portland. Mr. George himself, while
travelling in Ireland with an academical English friend, came under
"suspicion" in the eyes of one of Mr. Forster's officers, and was
arrested, but at once released. During the protracted confinement of Mr.
Davitt at Portland, the utter incapacity of Mr. Parnell and his
Parliamentary associates to manage the social revolution initiated by
the founder of the Land League became fully apparent, not only to
impartial, but even to sympathetic observers in America, long before it