* * * * *

As to the Special Commission and the excitement produced by the _Times_
attack on the Irish Members, including the publication of the forged
Parnell letter in 1887, our connection with the _Times_ brought us, of
course, into the full blast of it. Night after night I would sit up,
half asleep, to listen to the different phases of the story when in the
early hours of the morning my husband came back from the _Times_,
brimful of news, which he was as eager to tell as I to hear. My husband,
however, was only occasionally asked to write upon Ireland, and was not
in the inner counsels of the paper on that subject. We were both very
anxious about the facsimiled letter, and when, after long preliminaries,
the Commission came to the _Times_ witnesses, I well remember the dismay
with which I heard the first day of Mr. Macdonald's examination. Was
that _all_? I came out of the Court behind Mr. Labouchere and Sir George
Lewis, and in Mr. Labouchere's exultation one read the coming
catastrophe. I was on the Riviera when Pigott's confession, flight, and
suicide held the stage; yet even at that distance the shock was great.
The _Times_ attack was fatally discredited, and the influence of the
great paper temporarily crippled. Yet how much of that attack was sound,
how much of it was abundantly justified! After all, the report of the
Commission--apart altogether from the forged letter or letters--
certainly gave Mr. Balfour in Ireland later on the reasoned support of
English opinion in his hand-to-hand struggle with the Land League
methods, as the Commission had both revealed and judged them. After
thirty years one may well admit that the Irish land system had to go,
and that the Land League was "a sordid revolution," with both the crimes
and the excuses of a revolution. But at the time, British statesmen had
to organize reform with one hand, and stop boycotting and murder with
the other; and the light thrown by the Commission on the methods of