CHAPTER V.
AUSTRALIA AND IRISH HOME RULE.
It may be remembered that at a political banquet in London on St. Patrick's Day, Mr. Parnell, with characteristic boldness, declared that Australia, as well as America, had become "solid" in favour of Irish Home Rule. After this it was hardly to be wondered at that two of his Parliamentary followers who had never seen Australia were deputed to respond on behalf of my unhappy section of the British Empire. This banquet, which, but for the unwonted intrusion of Australia into its post-prandial oratory, was in no wise remarkable, took place only a few months ago, but already a wonderful transformation in Mr. Parnell's political creed seems to have been effected. When, at the Café Royal, he asserted that we Australians were "solid on his side," I, in common with the rest of my fellow-colonists, understood him to mean that we favoured Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. But since then Mr. Parnell, to
