Parnell's political views and tendencies were eagerly canvassed by those who had studied him closely. Many, among both Englishmen and Irishmen, held that he was at heart a Conservative, valuing strong government and attached to the rights of property. They predicted that if an Irish Parliament had been established, as proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1886, and an Irish cabinet formed to administer the affairs of the island, Parnell would have been the inevitable and somewhat despotic leader of the party of authority and order. His co-operation with the agrarian agitators from 1879 onwards was in this view merely a politic expedient to gain support for the Home Rule campaign. For this theory there is much to be said. Though he came to lead a revolution, and was willing, as appeared in the last few months of his life, to appeal to the genuine revolutionary party, Parnell was not by temper or conviction a revolutionist. Those who were left in Ireland of the old Fenian group, and especially that section of the extreme Fenians out of which the secret insurrectionary and dynamitard societies were formed, never liked or trusted him. The passion which originally carried him into public life was hatred of England, and a wish to restore to Ireland, if possible her national independence (though he rarely if ever avowed this), or at least her own Parliament. But he was no democratic leveller, and still less inclined to those socialistic doctrines which the section influenced by Mr. Davitt had espoused. He did not desire the "extinction of landlordism," and would probably have been a restraining and moderating force in an Irish legislature. That he was genuinely attached to his native country need not be doubted. But his patriotism had little of a sentimental quality, and seemed to spring as much from dislike of England as from love of Ireland.