The Life Of Charles Stewart Parnell Vol - I

i.
/Ex. 36] PARNELL AND THE MURDERS 357
Davitfc, * and declared he would leave public life. "How can I," he said, " carry on a public agitation if I am stabbed in the back in this way ?" He was wild. Talk of the calm and callous Parnell. There was not much calmness- or callousness about him that morning/
Later in the day he called on Sir Charles Dilke with Mr. Justin McCarthy.
'Parnell,' says Sir Charles, icalled upon me with Mr. Justin McCarthy the morning after the Phoenix Park murders. I never saw a man so cut up in my life. He was pale, careworn, altogether unstrung/
* On the Sunday after the Phoenix Park murders/ says Mr. Gladstone, ' while I was at lunch, a letter was brought to me from Parnell. I was much touched by it. He wrote evidently under strong emotion. He did not ask me if I would advise him to retire from public life or not. That was not how he put it. He asked me what effect I thought the murder would have on English public opinion in relation to his leadership of the Irish party. Well, I wrote expressing my own opinion, and what I thought wrould be the opinion of others, that his retirement from public life would do no good; on the contrary, would do harm. I thought his conduct in the whole matter very praiseworthy/
Mr. John Redmond gives the following 'reminiscence ' : c I was in Manchester the night of the Phoenix Park murders. I heard that Cavendish and Spencer had been killed. I went to the police station to make inquiries, but they would not tell me anything. I made a speech condemning the murder of Cavendish, saying the Government was the real cause of the crime. The " Times " reported my speech with the comment that