This book is a record of things the author saw, and of conversations he had, during a series of visits to Ireland between January and June 1888 made on his return from a sojourn in Rome during the celebration of the Jubilee of His Holiness Leo XIII. These visits were made in quest of light, not so much upon the proceedings and the purposes of the Irish "Nationalists" – with which, on both sides of the Atlantic, he has been tolerably familiar for many years past – as upon the social and economic results in Ireland of the processes of political vivisection to which that country has previously been so long subjected.

William Henry Hurlbert (1827-1895) was an American journalist and the possible author of "The Diary of a Public Man," published in the North American Review in 1879. His responsibility for the Diary – once dubbed the "most gigantic" problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing – was carefully concealed and has only recently been established.