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?

Seeing that Gladstone gave as one reason for the disestablishing of the Irish Church “the intensity of Fenianism,” so, in the same way, no one recognised more than Parnell did that the existence of a physical force movement was a strong argument for those engaged in the moral force agitation.  Therefore he was always anxious to conciliate and even cultivate the advanced element.  Of this I will here give one illustration, out of many I could mention, and this in connection with the custom of drinking what was called “the loyal toast,” which at one time used to be observed at some Home Rule celebrations.  It is a matter on which I have already explained my point of view.