by Mr. Parnell at the murders in the Phoenix Park, but I should be very much surprised to learn that any one of them all ever did, or ever would do, anything likely to bring any one of the authors of these murders to the bar of justice.  Mr. Parnell and his Parliamentary associates are held and bound by the essential conditions of their political existence to treat with complaisance the most extreme and violent men of their party.  Nor is this true of them alone.

There is no more respectable body of men in the United States than the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia.  This society was instituted in 1771, five years before the declaration of American Independence.  It is a charitable and social organisation only, with no political object or colour.  It is made up of men of character and substance.  Its custom has always been to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by a banquet, to which the most distinguished men of the country have repeatedly been bidden.  Immediately after the inauguration of Mr. Cleveland as President, on the 4th of March 1885, Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary of State of the United States, was invited by this Society to attend its one hundred and fourteenth banquet.  It will be remembered that, on the 30th of May 1884, London had been startled and shocked by an explosion of dynamite in St. James’s Square, which shattered many houses and inflicted cruel injuries upon several innocent people.  It was not so fatal to life as that explosion at the Salford Barracks, which Mr. Parnell treated as a “practical joke.”  But it excited lively indignation on both sides of the Atlantic, and Mr. Bayard, who at that time was a Senator of the United States, sternly denounced it and its authors on the floor of the American Senate.  What he had said as a Senator he thought it right to repeat as the Foreign Secretary of the United States in his reply to the invitation of the Hibernian Society in March 1885.  This reply ran as follows:—­

    “WASHINGTON, D.C., March 9, 1885.

    “NICHOLAS J. GRIFFIN, Esq., Secretary of the Hibernian Society of
    Philadelphia.

“Dear Sir,—­I have your personal note accompanying the card of invitation to dine with your ancient and honourable Society on their one hundred and fourteenth anniversary, St. Patrick’s Day, and I sincerely regret that I cannot accept it.  The obvious and many duties of my public office here speak for themselves, and to none with more force than to American citizens of Irish blood or birth who are honestly endeavouring to secure liberty by maintaining a government of laws, and who realise the constant attention that is needful.

“In the midst of anarchical demonstrations which we witness in other lands, and the echoes of which we can detect even here in our own free country, where base and silly individuals seek to stain the name of Ireland by associating the honest struggle for just government with senseless and