THE IRISH LEADER.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2029, 5 April 1890, Page 3

THE IRISH LEADER.

Mr Laing in his new book of “ Prohelms of the future ” gives the followinteresting sketch of Mr Parnell— W hat a career it has been ! A young man with no special gifts of position or fortune, little likely, as a Protestant and a landlord, to enlist the sympathies of the Irish race, gifted with no showy qualities of oratory, the very antipodes ot the former great Irish leader, O’Connell silent, self-restrained, reserved, I may almost say unsocial. I recollect this young man when I first knew him in the House of Commons— an obscure member even of his own Home Rule party ; one of a little knot of five or six Irish members who thought Isaac Butt’s leadership too tame, and whose ruling idea was to force the attention of the House to Irish grievances by organising obstruction. They succeeded, and soon became very obnoxious. Step by step Parnell came to the front, and first rivalled and then displaced Shaw in the leadership of the Irish party left vacant by the death of Butt. Like Carnot he organised victory, and even more than Bismarck, forged his own weapons as the strife went on. For Bismarck had his sturdy emperor, his admirable Prussian army, his strategist, Yc«n Moltke made to his hand: Parat,!! had nothing but what he made hi:.:aelf. His strength of character, practical sagacity, and far seeing insight, by degrees gave him an ascendancy which

secured him the support of the great majority of the Irish race at home and abroad, enabled him to wean them from impossible dreams of rebellion and revenge, to the practical policy of constitutional agitation ; and finally has placed the return of some eighty-fire out of one hundred and five members for Ireland in the hollow of his hand, and, what was apparently more hopeless, has silenced the conflicting jealousies and interests which informer days marred all Irish ipoyements, anc} drilled these eigfity-fiye members into a pompact body, acting as one man, under the control and advice of their leader. He has thus almost singlehanded advanced Home Rule from being a dream as wild as the restoration of the Heptarchy, to be the burning question of practical politics. He has got four-fifths of Ireland, two-thirds of Pcotland and Wales, and the bulk of the Liberal party in England on his side, and few dispassionate observers can doqbt tfiat whether for good or evil, the realisation of the main features of his policy has become a question of more or less, and of sooner or later, rather than of absolute and permanent rejection, This is a good deal for an undergraduate of Magdalene to fiavp done before hp has passed the meridian of middle life, ami to have done for a hopeless minority, an unpopular cause, and a down trodden race by sheer force of individual character.