CHAPTER XVI.
MICHAEL DAVITT'S RETURN FROM PENAL SERVITUDE—PARNELL AND THE "ADVANCED" ORGANISATION.
In the year following the Liverpool Home Rule Convention of 1877, I had the pleasure of welcoming back to freedom my old friend, Michael Davitt, after he had been in penal servitude close upon eight years. He had been released, along with other Fenian prisoners, and, with Corporal Chambers, came on April 28th, 1878, to a gathering we organised and held in the Adelphi Theatre, Liverpool, for the benefit of the liberated men, John O'Connor Power being the lecturer for the occasion, and Dr. Commins our chairman.
Michael Davitt, on rising to speak, was received with a terrific outburst of cheering, again and again repeated.
I was sitting immediately behind him on the platform, and I noticed, while he was speaking, a constant nervous twitching of his hand, which he held behind his back, and he was evidently in a state of highly-strung excitement. I was not surprised when we had that day a painful proof of how the prison treatment had undermined his constitution. After the gathering we brought the released prisoners and the principal speakers to be entertained at the house of Patrick Byrne, a warm-hearted, patriotic Irishman, and were much alarmed when Davitt fell into a deep faint, from which he only recovered through the ministrations of one of our most respected Liverpool Nationalists, Dr. Bligh, who fortunately was present. For a few moments it seemed as if he never would revive.
There is no doubt but that their treatment during their long term of penal servitude seriously affected the health of several of the Irish political prisoners. It was only three months previous to his visit to us in Liverpool that Davitt reached Dublin, with three others of the released prisoners—Sergeant McCarthy, Corporal Chambers, and John O'Brien. To the consternation of his friends, McCarthy died suddenly at Morrison's Hotel, on January 15th, the cause, it was believed, being heart disease. This caused such a shock to Chambers that his life, too, was put in danger. I was pleased to see him restored to health after this when he called on me in Liverpool with his brother, with whom I was well acquainted. The shock of the sudden death of his friend McCarthy must have affected Michael Davitt too, as we found from the report of our friend, Dr. Bligh, in what a precarious state of health he must have been at the time. It will be remembered that Rickard Burke became insane, it was thought, and stated in Parliament, owing to his treatment while in Chatham Prison.
Following our Liverpool gathering, we had on Sunday, May 5th, a meeting in the St. Helens Theatre for the same object. At this Parnell as well as Davitt was present. Speaking that day by desire of our St. Helens friends, I called attention to the appropriateness of our addressing the assembly from the boards of a theatre on which there had been the mimic representation of many a stirring drama. But no play the audience had ever witnessed on those boards could exceed in dramatic interest the life of the released convict, Michael Davitt. Nay, more, the grudging terms on which he had been released enabled him to appear that day in the real living character of a "Ticket-of-Leave-Man," which, no doubt, they had seen impersonated on those boards by some clever actor in the play of the same name.
I am reminded of that St. Helens meeting by a passage in Michael Davitt's book "The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland." I travelled from Liverpool to St. Helens to attend the meeting in the same carriage with Mr. Parnell. As I could always speak unreservedly to him I knew that though he would not actually join the advanced organisation, he regarded it as a useful force behind the constitutional movement. In the carriage, which it so happened we had to ourselves, we discussed the probabilities of the result of a resort to physical force for securing Irish freedom, should circumstances justify such a course, for Parnell would not have shrunk from taking the field if there had been a reasonable hope of success. Singularly enough, I find in Michael Davitt's book that he himself, on the day of that same St. Helens meeting, made an advance to Parnell with a view to getting him to join the revolutionary organisation, should the conditions be somewhat modified. Up till then I had seen more of Parnell than Davitt had and had enjoyed his full confidence. I had, therefore, come to the conclusion, from my conversations with him, that he was of far more service to the Irish cause as he was than if he had actually joined the revolutionary movement. I am not surprised, therefore, at Parnell's answer to Davitt: "No, I will never join any political secret society, oath bound or otherwise. My belief is that useful things for our Cause can be done in the British Parliament."
Nevertheless, I remember one public utterance of his which always struck me as most statesmanlike. After a frank statement that he was in favour of constitutional Home Rule, he, with equal frankness, declined to subscribe to the entire finality of that solution of the Irish problem. How, he asked, could he or any man put bounds to the progress of a nation?