[Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN.] IRELAND UNDER COERCION THE DIARY OF AN AMERICAN BY WILLIAM HENRY HURLBERT VOL. I. _SECOND EDITION_. 1888 "Upon the future of Ireland hangs the future of the British Empire." CARDINAL MANNING TO EARL GREY, 1868 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. Although barely a month has elapsed since the publication of these volumes, events of more or less general notoriety have so far confirmed the views taken in them of the actual state and outlook of affairs in Ireland, that I gladly comply with the request of my publisher for a Preface to this Second Edition. Upon one most important point--the progressive demoralisation of the Irish people by the methods of the so-called political combinations, which are doing the work of the Agrarian and Anti-Social Revolution in Ireland, some passages, from a remarkable sermon delivered in August in the Cathedral of Waterford by the Catholic bishop of that diocese, will be found to echo almost to the letter the statement given to me in June by a strong Protestant Home Ruler, that "the Nationalists are stripping Irishmen as bare of moral sense as the bushmen of South Africa." Speaking of what he had personally witnessed in one of the lanes of Waterford, the Bishop says, in the report which I have seen of his sermon, "the most barbarous tribes of Africa would justly feel ashamed if they were guilty of what I saw, or approached to the guilt I witnessed, on that occasion." As a faithful shepherd of his people, he is not content with general denunciations of their misconduct, but goes on to analyse the influences which are thus reducing a Christian people to a level below that of the savages whom Cardinal Lavigerie is now organising a great missionary crusade to rescue from their degradation. He agrees with Archbishop Croke in attributing much of this demoralisation to the excessive and increasing use of strong drink, striking evidences of which came under my own observation at more than one point of my Irish journeys. But I fear Archbishop Croke would scarcely agree with the Bishop of Waterford in his diagnosis of the effects upon the popular character of what has now come to pass current in many parts of Ireland as "patriotism."