Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 30, 2 August 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER. XXV.—(Continued.) Parnell’s strong remonstrances, unhappily, proved unavailing against the opposition of Michael Davitt and Sir Charles Russell, who had amassed the materials for great speeches and would listen to no counsels that would deprive them of the opportunity of delivering them. The speeches were afterwards published in book form, and undoubtedly contained matter of grave historical value, laboriously and convincingly put together, but it may well be doubted whether they would not have better served the purposes of. their authors had they been delivered in a series of platform speeches throughout Britain in the fruitful heat of a General Election, rather than day after day in the deadening atmosphere of an English Court from which all reality had departed. Russell’s fame was already made safe by his magnificent cross-examination of Pigott, for the equal of which as a masterpiece of sheer intellect and moral compulsion directed to the gradual unmasking and shamng of human villainy, until it left no better refuge ... than self-slaughter, one would have to go back to one or : two of O’Connell’s most famous achievements in a different planner. Parnell would not, however, have found it impossible to overcome the objections of the great advocate—absolute though he sometimes was — he not quite failed to shake Davitt’s determination to retain his seat in the Court to the finish. In the Parnell Commission Court, as in most other passages of his life, Davitt chose a place of his own, friendly, but at trying moments critical and apart, and' having himself, during the brief life of the Land League as an organisation, consistently devoted his speeches to the denunciation of crime, he was, perhaps, not unnaturally anxious to give emphasis to these denunciations without perceiving with what relief the three judges ..marked and applauded his individualistic attitude, and construed it to the prejudice of colleagues who were not to be hustled into acknowledgments of the responsibility of themselves or of the country for outbreaks of) passion which were fewer in number than in any semi-revolutionary movement in recorded history, and the guilt of which lay chiefly with the canting evictors and coercionist politicians who would fain have stripped the people of every bloodless weapon, of defence. By a singular contradiction, if Davitt’s undue sensitiveness to the good opinion of the three judges gave Parnell a certain amount of uneasiness, his unconquerable desire to keep up relations with certain of his old comrades of the secret societies in America, in the hope of turning them to account against the Times, made Parnell more uneasy still. There cam be no question that Davitt’s visit to Paris, during the early sittings of the Commission Court, was inspired by the noblest patriotic motives, but Parnell, who never lost his distrust of the secret forces which work in the background of every great national I movement, and as to whose extent or operations he could -Konly vaguely guess, was even angrier—and, as I think, V unjustly angrier with Davitt’s* well-intended measures in V. Paris than with his. refusal to quit the Cohnnission Court after the exposure and suicide of Pigott. Parnell had patience with mere rashness, hut for what he Vonceived to be stupidity he had none;' Davitt fell into kb the mistake of sending his cablegrams to America . by the , cable ' which touched at Valentia, and thus enabled tho

accomplices of the Times to tap his most confidential messages. For these messages from the point of view of the defence Parnell had but an indifferent respect, but the hetise which put them in the hands of the enemy aroused in him a quite extravagant degree of annoyance. “I dare say we shall have them all out in the great speech,” was his bitter comment. The die was cast, however. The two monumental speeches were delivered to audiences quite unworthy of the effort; the Times was able to prolong at a prodigious cost the farce for eight months after Pigott’s death, in order .to weaken the recollection of the infamous figure it cut on the one issue that really mattered; the three judges had time to amass the materials for a judgment of as much intrinsic value —I have already suggestedas a judgment upon a collection of old newspaper files; and the most serious consequence of all, in Parnell’s eyes, was that the opportunity was lost of forcing a General Election while the English constituencies were throbbing with sympathy. The Parnell Commission has already found competent historians and will find others; my own part in the grand drama was a small one and may be shortly related. 'My first encounter with the Three Judges was in January, 1889, a week or two before the Carrick-on-Suir prosecution and the Manchester adventure, to answer an application by the Times to .commit me for contempt of court for an article in United Ireland. The article was written by the acting editor, Matt Bodkin, a devoted friend, who during my now constant compulsory absences conducted the paper with a combined daring and wisdom that was never at fault in the perilous years of our mortal combat with Mr. Balfour. It was a withering indictment of the Times' procrastination in using the Commission Court from October to January for the daily defamation of Parnell and his Party by stale newspaper readings, while shirking every invitation to come to the point as to the only tangible allegation against them, and in the meantime scouring tin convict prisons and the American dynamite dens,-with the active co-operation of the Government, in search of informers and perjurers to prop up their Forgeries. Bodkin pressed hard to be allowed to take the sole responsibility on his own shoulders. This it was impossible for the legally responsible editor and publisher to allow, but in my address to the Court, I identified myself with the article without reserve, denouncing unstintedly the abuse of the Court and of public patience week after week in the Times' manifest eagerness to elude producing their proofs of the Letters, which alone had made the appointment of the Commission possible, and winding up with the declaration: ‘'Looking over the article in its entirety, in substance and in fact, I am sorry to say I can find in it nothing whatever for which 1 can-express honest regret and nothing which it may not be a solemn public duty for me to repeat.” To the astonishment V a public accustomed to think of an English High Court as an Olympus whose thunderbolts must instantly strike dead the man who should flaunt its majesty to its face, the presiding judge, Mr. Justice Hannon, after taking twenty-four hours to deliberate, dismissed the application of the Times in a speech in which the entire Bar and Press described not merely a measure of sympathy with the traverser which might almost have made old wigs stand on end, but further a covert, and indeed barely covert, intimation that the dilatoriness of the Times in facing the music had richly deserved the trouncing it had received at the hands of the. object of the AttorneyGeneral’s sphere-shaking application ( for contempt. The hint was promptly taken. The very next day the newspaper readings were summarily dropped, and the AttorneyGeneral threw on the witness-table his next best trump card to Pigott—one of the Phoenix Park murderers, Delany by name, who was fished out of a penal establishment, by tire bribe of the cancellation of his life sentence, and doubtless by ample cash considerations to boot, to give some nebulous evidence of certain relations of the Treasurer of the Land League (Mr. Pat Egan) with the Invincibles. The evidence proved on cross-examination to be silly hearsay and nothing more, but at least the gentleman of the Invincibles was an approach to business. Three weeks after, Pigott himself was on the witness-table and the Times’ last card was played. • fTd be continued.)