The "boycotting," by clerical machinery, of independent lay opinion in civil matters, is to the body politic of a Catholic country what the germ of cancer is to the physical body.

And though Mr.Rolleston, in this article, avowed himself to be a hearty supporter of the "political programme of the National League," and went so far even as to maintain that the social boycotting, "which makes the League technically an illegal conspiracy against law and individual liberty," might be "in many cases justified by the magnitude of the legalised crime against which it was directed," it was obvious to me that he could not long remain blind to the true drift of things in an organisation condemned, by the conditions it has created for itself, to deal with the thinkers of Ireland as it deals with the tenants of Ireland.

His recent pamphlet on "Boycotting" proves that I was right.

What he said to me the other day in a letter about the pamphlet may be said as truly of the article.

It was "a shaft sunk into the obscure depths of Irish opinion, to bring to light and turn to service whatever there may be in those depths of sound and healthy;" and one of my special objects in this present visit to Ireland was to get a personal touch of the intellectual movement which is throwing such thinkers as Mr.Rolleston to the front.
We were five at table, Mr.Rolleston's other guests being Mr.John O'Leary, whose name is held in honour for his courage and honesty by all who know anything of the story of Ireland in our times, and who was sent a quarter of a century ago as a Fenian patriot--not into seclusion with sherry and bitters, at Kilmainham, like Mr.Gladstone's "suspects" of 1881--but like Michael Davitt, into the stern reality of penal servitude; Dr.Sigerson, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the Boyal University, and an authority upon the complicated question of Irish Land Tenures; and Mr.John F.Taylor, a leading barrister of Dublin, an ally on the Land Question of Mr.Davitt, and an outspoken Repealer of the Union of 1800.
I have long wished to meet Mr.O'Leary, who sent me, through a correspondent of mine, two years ago, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered papers I have ever read on the possibilities and impossibilities of Home Rule for Ireland; and it was a great pleasure to find in the man the elevation of tone, the breadth of view, and the refined philosophic perception of the strong and weak points in the Irish case, which had charmed me in.