Note 26 — APPENDIX.
Reading edition
Footnote 26:
(return)
It may be well to say here that whatever prominence Mr. O’Donovan Rossa has had among the Irish in America has been largely, if not chiefly, due to the curious persistency of Sir William Harcourt, when a Minister, in making him the ideal Irish-American leader. In and out of Parliament, Sir William Harcourt continually spoke of Mr. Rossa as of a kind of Irish Jupiter Tonans, wielding all the terrors of dynamite from beyond the Atlantic. This was a source of equal amusement to the Irish-American organisers in America and satisfaction to Mr. Rossa himself. I remember that when a question arose of excluding Mr. Rossa from an important Irish-American convention at Philadelphia, as not being the delegate of any recognised Irish-American body, Mr. Sullivan told me that he should recommend the admission of Mr. Rossa to the floor without a right to deliberative action, expressly because his presence, when reported, would be a cause of terror to Sir William Harcourt.