The Irish lost Home Rule by allowing themselves to be stampeded. Their English friends, the enemy, playing upon their prejudices, they became drunk with hate, and then their shillalahs resounded a tattoo upon the head of their leader. Nations and people who turn upon their best friends are too common to catalog.
In the "Westminster Review" for January, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-one, Elizabeth Cady Stanton says: "The spectacle of a whole nation hounding one man, and determined to administer summary punishment, is pitiful at a time when those who love their fellowmen are asking for all the best moral appliances and conditions for the reformation of mankind. Force, either in the form of bodily infliction or of mental lashing, has been abandoned by the experienced as evil and ineffective in all its attributes. Acting on this principle, what right has a nation to turn its whole engine of denunciation upon a human being for the violation of a personal unsettled question of morals?"
A great, noble and unswerving love between a man and a woman, mentally mated, is an unusual affair. That the Irish people should repudiate, scorn and spurn a man and a woman who possessed such a love is a criticism on their intelligence that needs no comment. But the world is fast reaching a point where it realizes that honesty, purity of purpose, loyalty and steadfastness in love fit people for leadership, if anything does or can, and that from such a relationship spring justice, freedom, charity, generosity and the love that suffereth long and is kind. There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others.
The people who desire political Home Rule must first of all learn to rule their own spirits, and be willing to grant to individuals the right and privilege of Home Rule in the home where love alone rules.
From the time that O'Shea took his seat in Parliament, Parnell showed by his face and manner that he was a man with a rope tied to his foot. His health declined, he became apprehensive, nervous, and at times lost the perfect poise that had won for him the title of the "Uncrowned King." He had bargained with a man with whom no contract was sacred, and he was dealing with people as volatile and uncertain as Vesuvius.
"I have within my hand a Parliament for Ireland," said Parnell in a speech to a mob at Galway. "I have within my hand a Parliament for Ireland, and if you destroy me, you destroy Home Rule for Ireland!" And the Irish people destroyed Parnell. In this they had the assistance of Gladstone, who after years of bitter opposition to Parnell had finally been won over to Ireland's cause, not being able to disrupt it. When we can not down a strong man in fair fight, all is not lost—we can still join hands with him. When Captain O'Shea secured a divorce from his wife, naming Parnell as co-respondent, and Parnell practically pleaded guilty by making no defense, the rage against Parnell was so fierce that if he had appeared in Ireland, his life would have paid the forfeit.
Then, when in a few months he married the lady according to the Civil Code, but without Episcopal or Catholic sanction, the storm broke afresh, and a hypocritical world worked overtime trying to rival the Billingsgate Calendar. The newspapers employed watchers, who picketed the block where Parnell and his wife lived, and telegraphed to Christendom the time the lights were out, and whether Mr. Parnell appeared with a shamrock or a rose in his buttonhole. The facts that Mrs. Parnell wore her hair in curls, and smilingly hummed a tune as she walked to the corner, were construed into proof of brazen guilt and a desire to affront respectable society.
Gladstone was a strict Churchman, but he was also a man of the world. Parnell's offense was the offense committed by Lord Nelson, Lord Hastings, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Charles Dilke, Shakespeare, and most of those who had made the name and fame of England worldwide. Gladstone might have stood by Parnell and steadied the Nationalist Party until the storm of bigotry and prejudice abated; but he saw his chance to escape from a hopeless cause, and so he demanded the resignation of Parnell while the Irish were still rabid against the best friend they ever had. Feud and faction had discouraged Gladstone, and now was his chance to get out without either backing down or running away! By the stroke of a pen he killed the only man in Great Britain who rivaled him in power—the only Irishman worthy to rank with O'Connor and Grattan. It was an opportunity not to be lost—just to take the stand of virtue and lift up his hands in affected horror, instead of stretching out those hands to help a man whose sole offense was that he loved a woman with a love that counted not the cost, hesitated at no risk, and which eventually led not only to financial and political ruin, but to death itself.
Parnell died six months after his marriage, from nerve-wrack that had known no respite for ten years.