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John Redmond's Last Years

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Title: John Redmond's Last Years

Author: Stephen Lucius Gwynn


        
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                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN REDMOND'S LAST YEARS ***

[Illustration]




JOHN REDMOND'S LAST YEARS


BY

STEPHEN GWYNN


LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

1919

[All rights reserved]




PREFACE


In writing this book, I have had access to my late leader's papers for
the period beginning with the war. These were placed at my disposal by
his son, Major William Archer Redmond, D.S.O., M.P. I had also the
consent of Mrs. Redmond to my undertaking the task. But for the book and
for the opinions expressed in it I am solely responsible. No condition
having been imposed upon me, it seemed best, for many reasons, that it
should be written, as it has been written, without consultation.

A writer in whom such a trust has been placed may well be at a loss how
to express his gratitude, but can never convey the measure of his
anxiety. From those who cherish Redmond's memory, and especially from
those who were nearest to him in comradeship and affection, I must only
crave the indulgence which should be accorded to sincere effort.
Differences of interpretation there will be in any review of past
events, and others can claim with justice that on many points they were
better situated for full understanding than was I. Yet for the period
which is specially studied, if there is failure in comprehension it
cannot be excused by lack of opportunity to be thoroughly informed.

To readers at large I would say this--that if any sentence in these
pages be uncandid or ungenerous, it is most unworthy to be found in the
record of such a man.

S.G.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                      PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY                                 1

II. REDMOND AS CHAIRMAN                        23

III. THE HOME RULE BILL OF 1912                62

IV. THE RIVAL VOLUNTEER FORCES                 90

V. WAR IN EUROPE                              126

VI. THE RAISING OF THE IRISH BRIGADES         152

VII. THE REBELLION AND ITS SEQUEL             218

VIII. THE CONVENTION AND THE END              259

INDEX                                         343

PORTRAIT OF JOHN REDMOND      _Frontispiece_




JOHN REDMOND'S LAST YEARS




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

I


The time has not yet come to write the biography of John Redmond. Not
until the history of the pledge-bound Irish Parliamentary party can be
treated freely, fully and impartially as a chapter closed and ended will
it be possible to record in detail the life of a man who was associated
with it almost from its beginning and who from the opening of this
century guided it with almost growing authority to the statutory
accomplishment of its desperate task; who knew, in it and for it, all
vicissitudes of fortune and who gave to it without stint or reservation
his whole life's energy from earliest manhood to the grave.

But when the war came, unforeseen, shifting all political balances,
transmuting the greatest political issues, especially those of which the
Irish question is a type, it imposed upon men and upon nations, but
above all on the leaders of nations, swift and momentous decisions.
Because that critical hour presented to Redmond's vision a great
opportunity which he must either seize single-handed or let it for ever
pass by; because he rose to the height of the occasion with the courage
which counts upon and commands success; because he sought by his own
motion to swing the whole mass and weight of a nation's feeling into a
new direction--for all these reasons his last years were different in
kind from any that had gone before; and as such they admit of and demand
separate study. Intelligent comprehension of what he aimed at, what he
achieved, and what forces defeated him in these last years of his life
is urgently needed, not for the sake of his memory, but for Ireland's
sake; because until his policy is understood there is little chance that
Irishmen should attain what he aspired to win for Ireland--the strength
and dignity of a free and united nation.

It is of Redmond's policy for Ireland in relation to the war, and to the
events which in Ireland arose out of the war, that this book is mainly
designed to treat. Yet to make that policy intelligible some history is
needed of the startling series of political developments which the war
interrupted but did not terminate--and which, though still recent, are
blurred in public memory by all that has intervened. Further back still,
a brief review of his early career must be given, not only to set the
man's figure in relation to his environment, but to show that this final
phase was in reality no new departure, no break with his past, but a
true though a divergent evolution from all that had gone before.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ireland, although so small in extent and population, is none the less a
country of many and locally varying racial strains; and John Redmond
sprang from one of the most typical. He was a Wexfordman; that is to
say, he came from the part of Ireland where if you cross the Channel
there is least difference between the land you leave and the land you
sail to; where the sea-divided peoples have been always to some extent
assimilated. Here in the twelfth century the first Norman-Welsh invaders
came across. The leader of their first party, Raymond Le Gros, landed at
a point between Wexford and Waterford; the town of Wexford was his
first capture; and where he began his conquest he settled. From this
stock the Redmond name and line descend.

Thus John Redmond came from an invading strain in which Norman and Celt
were already blended; and he grew up in a country thickly settled with
men whose ancestors came along with his from across the water. Till a
century ago the barony of Forth retained a dialect of its own which was
in effect such English as men spoke before Chaucer began to write; and
even to-day in any Wexford fair or market you will see among the strong,
well-nourished, prosperous farmers many faces and figures which an
artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional
John Bull. Redmond himself, hawk-faced and thick-bodied, might have been
taken for no bad reincarnation of Raymond Le Gros. To this extent he was
less of a Celt than many of his countrymen; but he was assuredly none
the less Irish because he was a Wexfordman. The county of his birth was
the county which had made the greatest resistance to English power in
Ireland since Sarsfield and his "Wild Geese" crossed to Flanders. Born
in 1857, he grew up in a country-side full of memories of events then
only some sixty years old; he knew and spoke with many men who had been
out with pike or fowling-piece in 1798. Rebel was to him from boyhood up
a name of honour; and this was not only a phase of boyish enthusiasm. In
his mature manhood, speaking as leader of the Irish party, he told the
House of Commons plainly that in his deliberate judgment Ireland's
situation justified an appeal to arms, and that if rebellion offered a
reasonable prospect of gaining freedom for a united Ireland he would
counsel rebellion on the instant.

But if he was always and admittedly a potential rebel, no man was ever
less a revolutionary. As much a constitutionalist as Hampden or
Washington, he was so by temperament and by inheritance. The tradition
of parliamentary service had been in his family for two generations.
Two years after his birth his great-uncle, John Edward Redmond, from
whom he got his baptismal names, was elected unopposed as Liberal member
for the borough of Wexford, where his statue stands in the market-place,
commemorating good service rendered. Much of the rich flat land which
lies along the railway from Wexford to Rosslare Harbour was reclaimed by
this Redmond's enterprise from tidal slob. On his death in 1872 the seat
passed to his nephew William Archer Redmond, whose two sons were John
and William Redmond, with whom this book deals. Thus the present Major
William Archer Redmond, M.P., represents four continuous generations of
the same family sent to Westminster among the representatives of
Nationalist Ireland.

Not often is a family type so strongly marked as among the men of this
stock. But the portraits show that while the late Major "Willie" Redmond
closely resembled his father, in John Redmond and John Redmond's son
there were reproduced the more dominant and massive features of the
first of the parliamentary line.

To sum up then, John Redmond and his brother came of a long strain of
Catholic gentry who were linked by continuous historic association of
over seven centuries to a certain district in South Leinster, and who
retained leadership among their own people. The tradition of military
service was strong, too, in this family. Their father's cousin, son to
the original John Edward Redmond, was a professional soldier; and their
mother was the daughter of General Hoey. They were brought up in an
old-fashioned country house, Ballytrent, on the Wexford coast, and the
habits of outdoor country life and sport which furnished the chief
pleasure of their lives were formed in boyhood. Their upbringing
differed from that of boys in thousands of similar country houses
throughout Ireland only in one circumstance; they were Catholics, and
even so lately as in their boyhood Catholic land-owners were
comparatively few.

John Redmond was four years older than his younger brother, born in
1861. He got his schooling under the Jesuits at Clongowes in early days,
before the system of Government endowment by examination results had
given incentive to cramming. According to his own account he did little
work and nobody pressed him to exertion. But the Jesuits are skilful
teachers, and they left a mark on his mind. It is scarcely chance that
the two speakers of all I have heard who had the best delivery were
pupils of theirs--Redmond and Sir William Butler. They taught him to
write, they taught him to speak and to declaim, they encouraged his
natural love of literature. His taste was formed in those days and it
was curiously old-fashioned. His diction in a prepared oration might
have come from the days of Grattan: and he maintained the old-fashioned
habit of quotation. No poetry written later than Byron, Moore and
Shelley made much appeal to him, save the Irish political ballads. But
scarcely any English speaker quoted Shakespeare in public so often or so
aptly as this Irishman.

From Clongowes he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he matriculated
in October 1874 at the age of seventeen. His academic studies seem to
have been half-hearted. At the end of a year his name was taken off the
College books by his father, but was replaced. At the close of his
second year of study, in July 1876, it was removed again and for good.

But apart from what he learnt at school, his real education was an
apprenticeship; he was trained in the House of Commons for the work of
Parliament. He was a boy of fifteen, of an age to be keenly interested,
when the representation of Wexford passed from his great-uncle to his
father. Probably the reason why he was removed from Trinity College was
the desire of Mr. William Redmond to have his son with him in London.
Certainly John Redmond was there during the session of 1876, for on the
introduction of Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill he recalled a
finely apposite Shakespearean quotation which he had heard Butt use in a
Home Rule debate of that year. In May 1880 his father procured him a
clerkship in the House. The post to which he was assigned was that of
attendant in the Vote Office, so that his days (and a great part of his
nights) were spent in the two little rooms which open off the Members'
Lobby, that buzzing centre of parliamentary gossip, activity and
intrigue. Half a dozen steps only separated him from the door of the
Chamber itself, and that door he was always privileged to pass and
listen to the debates, standing by the entrance outside the magical
strip of matting which indicates the bar of the House. From this point
of vantage he watched the first stages of a Parliament in which Mr,
Gladstone set out with so triumphant a majority--and watched too the
inroads made upon the power and prestige of that majority by the new
parliamentary force which had come into being.

Redmond himself described thus (in a lecture delivered at New York in
1896) the policy which came to be known as "The New Departure":

     "Mr. Parnell found that the British Parliament insisted upon
     turning a deaf ear to Ireland's claim for justice. He resolved to
     adopt the simple yet masterly device of preventing Parliament doing
     any work at all until it consented to hear."

In the task of systematic and continuous obstruction Parnell at once
found a ready helper, Mr. Joseph Biggar. But Parnell, Biggar and those
who from 1876 to 1880 acted generally or frequently with them were only
members of the body led by Butt; though they were, indeed, ultimately in
more or less open revolt against Butt's leadership. When Butt died, and
was at least nominally replaced by Mr. Shaw, the growth of Parnell's
ascendancy became more marked. In the general election of 1880 sixty
Home Rulers were returned to Parliament; and at a meeting attended by
over forty, twenty-three declared for Parnell as their leader. A
question almost of ceremonial observance immediately defined the issue.
Liberals were in power, and Government was more friendly to Ireland's
claims than was the Opposition. Mr. Shaw and his adherents were for
marking support of the Government by sitting on the Government side of
the Chamber. Parnell insisted that the Irish party should be independent
of all English attachments and permanently in opposition till Ireland
received its rights. With that view he and his friends took up their
station on the Speaker's left below the gangway, where they held it
continuously for thirty-nine years.

Mr. William Redmond was no supporter of the new policy. As the little
group which Parnell headed grew more and more insistent in their
obstruction, the member for Wexford spoke less and less. His
interventions were rare and dignified. In the debate on the Address in
the new Parliament of 1880 he acted as a lieutenant to Mr. Shaw. Yet he
was on very friendly terms with Parnell--almost a neighbour of his, for
the Parnell property, lying about the Vale of Ovoca, touched the border
of Wexford.

Mr. William Redmond's career in that Parliament was soon ended. In
November 1880 he died, and, normally, his son, whose qualifications and
ambitions were known, would have succeeded him. But collision between
Government and the Parnellite party was already beginning. Mr. T.M.
Healy, then Parnell's secretary, had been arrested for a speech in
denunciation of some eviction proceedings. This was the first arrest of
a prominent man under Mr. Forster's rule as Chief Secretary, and
Parnell, with whom in those days the decision rested, decided that Mr.
Healy should immediately be put forward for the vacant seat. In later
days he was to remind Mr. Healy how he had done this, "rebuking and
restraining the prior right of my friend, Jack Redmond." Redmond had not
long to wait, however. Another vacancy occurred in another Wexford seat,
the ancient borough of New Ross, and he was returned without opposition
at a crucial moment in the parliamentary struggle.

That struggle was not only parliamentary. From the famine year of 1879
onwards a fierce agitation had begun, whose purpose was to secure the
land of Ireland to the people who worked it. Davitt was to the land what
Parnell was to the parliamentary campaign: but it was Parnell's genius
which fused the two movements.

To meet the growing power of the Land League, Mr. Forster demanded a
Coercion Bill, and after long struggles in the Cabinet he prevailed.
Against this Bill it was obvious that all means of parliamentary
resistance would be used to the uttermost.

They were still of a primitive simplicity. In the days before Parnell
the House of Commons had carried on its business under a system of rules
which worked perfectly well because there was a general disposition in
the assembly to get business done. A beginning of the new order was made
when a group of ex-military men attempted to defeat the measure for
abolishing purchase of commissions in the Army by a series of dilatory
motions. This, however, was an isolated occurrence. Any English member
who set himself to thwart the desire of the House for a conclusion by
using means which the general body considered unfair would have been
reduced to quiescence by a demonstration that he was considered a
nuisance. His voice would have been drowned in a buzz of conversation or
by less civil interruptions. This implied, however, a willingness to be
influenced by social considerations, and, more than that, a loyalty to
the traditions and purposes of the House. Parnell felt no such
willingness and acknowledged no such loyalty.

"His object," said Redmond in the address already quoted, "was to injure
it so long as it refused to listen to the just claims of his country."
The House, realizing Parnell's intention, visited upon him and his
associates all the penalties by which it was wont to enforce its wishes:
but the penalties had no sting. All the displays of anger, disapproval,
contempt, all the vocabulary of denunciation in debate and in the Press,
all the studied forms of insult, all the marks of social displeasure,
only served to convince the Irishmen that they were producing their
effect. Still, the House continued to act on the assumption that it
could vindicate its traditions in the old traditional way: it was
determined to change none of the rules which had stood for so many
generations: it would maintain its liberties and put down in its own way
those who had the impertinence to abuse them. The breaking-point came
exactly at the moment when Redmond was elected.

On Monday, Jan. 24th, 1881, Mr. Forster introduced his Coercion Bill. It
was open, of course, to any member to speak once, and once only, on the
main motion. But every member had an indefinite right to move the
adjournment of the debate, and on each such motion every member could
speak again. The debate was carried all through that week. It was
resumed on Monday, 31st. The declaration of Redmond's election was fixed
for Tuesday, February 1st, in New Ross--there being no contest. A
telegram summoned him to come instantly after the declaration to London.
He took the train at noon, travelled to Dublin and crossed the Channel.
At Holyhead about midnight another telegram told him that the debate was
still proceeding. He reached Euston on the Wednesday morning, drove
straight to the House, and there, standing at the bar, saw what he thus
described:

     "It was thus, travel-stained and weary, that I first presented
     myself as a member of the British Parliament. The House was still
     sitting, it had been sitting without a break for over forty hours,
     and I shall never forget the appearance the Chamber presented. The
     floor was littered with paper. A few dishevelled and weary Irishmen
     were on one side of the House, about a hundred infuriated
     Englishmen upon the other; some of them still in evening dress, and
     wearing what were once white shirts of the night before last. Mr.
     Parnell was upon his legs, with pale cheeks and drawn face, his
     hands clenched behind his back, facing without flinching a
     continuous roar of interruption. It was now about eight o'clock.
     Half of Mr. Parnell's followers were out of the Chamber snatching a
     few moments' sleep in chairs in the Library or Smoke Room. Those
     who remained had each a specified period of time allotted him to
     speak, and they were wearily waiting their turn. As they caught
     sight of me standing at the bar of the House of Commons there was a
     cheer of welcome. I was unable to come to their aid, however, as
     under the rules of the House I could not take my seat until the
     commencement of a new sitting. My very presence, however, brought,
     I think, a sense of encouragement and approaching relief to them;
     and I stood there at the bar with my travelling coat still upon me,
     gazing alternately with indignation and admiration at the amazing
     scene presented to my gaze.

     "This, then, was the great Parliament of England! Of intelligent
     debate there was none. It was one unbroken scene of turbulence and
     disorder. The few Irishmen remained quiet, too much amused,
     perhaps, or too much exhausted to retaliate. It was the
     English--the members of the first assembly of gentlemen in Europe,
     as they love to style it--who howled and roared, and almost foamed
     at the mouth with rage at the calm and pale-featured young man who
     stood patiently facing them and endeavouring to make himself
     heard."

An hour later the closure was applied, for the first time in
Parliament's history. The records of Hansard spoil a story which Redmond
was fond of telling--that he took his oath and his seat, made his maiden
speech and was suspended all in the same evening. In point of fact he
took his seat that Wednesday afternoon, when the House sat for a few
hours only and adjourned again. Next day news came in that Davitt had
been arrested in Ireland. Mr. Dillon, in the process of endeavouring to
extract an explanation from the Government, was named and suspended.
When the Prime Minister after this rose to speak, Mr. Parnell moved:
"That Mr. Gladstone be not heard."

The Speaker, ruling that Mr. Gladstone was in possession of the House,
refused to put the motion. Mr. Parnell, insisting that his motion should
be put, came into collision with the authority of the Chair and was
formally "named." Mr. Gladstone then moved his suspension and a division
was called--whereupon, under the rules which then existed, all members
were bound to leave the Chamber. On this occasion the Irish members
remained seated, as a protest, and after the division the Speaker
solemnly reported this breach of order to the House. For their refusal
to obey the Irish members present were suspended from the service of the
House, and as a body they refused to leave unless removed by physical
force. Accordingly, man by man was ordered to leave and each in turn
rose up with a brief phrase of refusal, after which the Sergeant-at-Arms
with an officer approached and laid a hand on the recusant's shoulder.
Redmond, when his turn came, said:

"As I regard the whole of these proceedings as unmitigated despotism, I
beg respectfully to decline to withdraw."

That was his maiden speech. Having delivered it, "Mr. Redmond," says
Hansard, "was by desire of Mr. Speaker removed by the Sergeant-at-Arms
from the House." It was a strange beginning for one of the greatest
parliamentarians of our epoch--and one of the greatest conservatives.
The whole bent of his mind was towards moderation in all things.
Temperamentally, he hated all forms of extravagant eccentricity; he
loved the old if only because it was old; he had the keenest sense not
only of decorum but of the essential dignity which is the best guardian
of order. Yet here he was committed to a policy which aimed deliberately
at outraging all the established decencies--at disregarding
ostentatiously all the usages by which an assembly of gentlemen had
regulated their proceedings.

What is more, it was an assembly which Redmond found temperamentally
congenial to him--an assembly which, apart from its relation to Ireland,
he thoroughly admired and liked. In 1896, when Irish members were
fiercely in opposition to the Government, he concluded his description
of Parliament with these words:

     "In the main, the House of Commons is, I believe, dominated by a
     rough-and-ready sense of manliness and fair-play. Of course, I am
     not speaking of it as a governing body. In that character it has
     been towards Ireland always ignorant and nearly always unfair. I am
     treating it simply as an assembly of men, and I say of it, it is a
     body where sooner or later every man finds his proper level, where
     mediocrity and insincerity will never permanently succeed, and
     where ability and honesty of purpose will never permanently fail."

That was no mean tribute, coming from one who held himself aloof from
all the personal advantages belonging to the society whose rules he did
not recognize. The opinion to which the Irish members of Parnell's
following were amenable was not made at Westminster; it did not exist
there--except, and that in its most rigid form, amongst themselves.

It is worth while to recall for English readers--and perhaps not for
them only--what membership of Parnell's party involved. In the first
place, there was a self-denying ordinance by which the man elected to it
bound himself to accept no post of any kind under Government. All the
chances which election to Parliament opens to most men--and especially
to men of the legal profession--were at once set aside. Absolute
discipline and unity of action, except in matters specially left open to
individual judgment, were enforced on all. These were the essentials.
But in the period of acute war between the Irish and all other parties
which was opening when Redmond entered there was a self-imposed rule
that as the English public and English members disapproved and disliked
the Irishmen an answering attitude should be adopted: that even private
hospitality should be avoided and that the belligerents should behave as
if they were quite literally in an enemy's country.

Later, when Mr. Gladstone had adopted the Irish cause and alliance with
the Liberal party had begun, the rigour of this attitude was modified.
Many Irish members joined the Liberal clubs and went freely to houses
where they were sure of sympathy. Yet neither of the Redmonds followed
far in this direction, and the habit of social isolation which they
formed in their early days lasted with them to the end. If John Redmond
ever went to any house in London which was not an Irish home it was by
the rarest exception.

For society, Parnell's party depended on themselves and their countrymen
and sympathizers. But they were in no way to be pitied; they were the
best of company for one another. It was a movement of the young, it had
all the strength and audacity of youth, it was a great adventure. A few
men from an older generation came with them, Mr. Biggar, Justin McCarthy
and others. But their leader, though older than most of his followers,
was a young man by parliamentary standards. In 1880 Parnell was only
thirty-three; and within four years more he was as great a power in the
House as Mr. Gladstone. Some few years back I heard Willie Redmond say
in the Members' smoking-room, "Isn't it strange to think that Parnell
would be sixty now if he had lived. I can't imagine him as an old man."
Yet the accent of maturity was on Parnell's leadership; the men whom he
led were essentially young. In 1881, when Redmond entered Parliament,
Mr. Dillon was thirty, Mr. T.P. O'Connor and Mr. Sexton veterans of
thirty-three, Mr. Healy twenty-six. Mr. William O'Brien (who did not
come in until 1883) was of the same year as Mr. Dillon. Redmond was
younger than any of them, being elected at the age of twenty-four. Yet
nobody then thought it surprising that he should be sent in 1882 to
represent the party on a mission to Australia and the United States at a
most difficult time. The Phoenix Park murders had created widespread
indiscriminating anger against all Irish Nationalists throughout the
Empire, and Redmond found it difficult to secure even a hall to speak
in. For support there was sent to him his brother, then a youth of
twenty-one, and feeling ran so strong against the two that the Prime
Minister of New South Wales (Sir Henry Parkes) proposed their expulsion
from the colony. Nevertheless, Redmond made good. "The Irish working-men
stood by me," he said, "and in fact saved the situation." Fifteen
thousand pounds were collected before they left the island continent.

It indicates well the changed conditions to remember that when in 1906
Mr. Hazleton and the late T.M. Kettle were selected to go on a far less
arduous and difficult mission to America, there was much talk about the
astonishing youth of our representatives. Yet both were then older than
John Redmond was in 1882--to say nothing of his brother, who must have
been the most exuberantly youthful spokesman that a serious cause ever
found.

The Redmonds' stay in Australia, which lasted over a year, determined
one important matter for both young men; they found their wives in the
colony whose Prime Minister proposed to expel them. John Redmond married
Miss Joanna Dalton and his brother her near kinswoman, Miss Eleanor
Dalton. Willie Redmond was elected to Parliament in his absence for his
father's old seat--Mr. Healy having vacated Wexford to fight and win a
sensational election in county Monaghan.

This early visit to the great transmarine dominions, and the ties which
he formed there, left a marked impression on John Redmond's mind, which
was reinforced by other visits in later years, and by all the growing
associations that linked him to life and politics in the dominions.
Redmond knew vastly more, and in truth cared vastly more, about the
British Empire than most Imperialists. His affection was not based on
any inherited prejudice, nor inspired by a mere geographical idea. He
was attracted to that which he had seen and handled, in whose making he
had watched so many of his fellow-countrymen fruitfully and honourably
busy. He felt acutely that the Empire belonged to Irish Nationalists at
least as much as to English Tories. America also was familiar to him,
and he had every cause to be grateful to the United States; but his
interest in the dominions was of a different kind. He felt himself a
partner in their glories, and by this feeling he was linked in sympathy
to a great many elements in British life that were otherwise uncongenial
to him--and was, on the other hand, divided in sympathy from some who in
Irish politics were his staunch supporters. He could never understand
the psychology of the Little Englander. "If I were an Englishman," he
once said to me, "I should be the greatest Imperialist living." From
first to last his attitude was that which is indicated by a passage of
his speech on Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill:

     "As a Nationalist, I may say I do not regard as entirely palatable
     the idea that for ever and a day Ireland's voice should be excluded
     from the councils of an Empire which the genius and valour of her
     sons have done so much to build up and of which she is to remain a
     part."[1]



II

To follow in detail Redmond's career under Parnell's leadership would be
beyond the scope of this book. Less conspicuous in Parliament than such
lieutenants of "the Chief" as Mr. Sexton, Mr. Dillon and Mr. Healy, John
Redmond acted as one of the party whips and was in much demand outside
Parliament as a platform speaker. In August 1886 he was once more sent
overseas to attend the Convention of the Irish Race at Chicago. He had
to tell his hearers of victory and of repulse.

     "When you last assembled in Convention, two years ago, the Irish
     party in Parliament did not number more than forty; to-day we hold
     five-sixths of the Irish seats, and speak in the name of
     five-sixths of the Irish people in Ireland. Two years ago we had
     arrayed against us all English political parties and every English
     statesman; to-day we have on our side one of the great English
     political parties, which, though its past traditions in Ireland
     have been evil, still represents the party of progress in England,
     and the greatest statesman of the day, who has staked his all upon
     winning for Ireland her national rights. Two years ago England had
     in truth, in Mitchel's phrase, the ear of the world. To-day, at
     last, that ear, so long poisoned with calumnies of our people, is
     now open to the voice of Ireland. Two years ago the public opinion
     of the world--aye, and even of this free land of America--was
     doubtful as to the justice of our movement; to-day the opinion of
     the civilized world, and of America in particular, is clearly and
     distinctly on our side."

On the other hand, in England the forces of reaction had succeeded. The
Home Rule Bill had been defeated and the Liberal party broken up. A
Government was in power whose programme was one of coercion. But
Ireland, Redmond said, was ready for the fight and confident that with
the weapons at command the enemy could be defeated.

Who were the enemy, and what the weapon? His speech made this plain.

     "Once more Irish landlords have behaved themselves with
     unaccountable folly and stupidity. They have once more stood
     between Ireland and her freedom, and have refused even an
     extravagant price for the land because the offer was coupled with
     the concession of an Irish Parliament. So be it. I believe the last
     offer has been made to Irish landlordism. The ultimate settlement
     of this question must now be reserved for the Parliament of
     Ireland, and meantime the people must take care to protect
     themselves and their children. In many parts of Ireland, I assert,
     rent is to-day an impossibility, and in every part of Ireland the
     rents demanded are exorbitant, and will not, and cannot, be paid."

He was wrong. The settlement of this vast question was to be
accomplished through the Imperial Parliament, not the Irish. Yet it was
accomplished in essence by an agreement between Irishmen for which
Redmond himself was largely responsible.

That settlement, however, merely ratified in 1903 the final stage in the
conversion of both countries to Parnell's policy of State-aided land
purchase. Tentative beginnings were made with it under the Government
which was in power from 1886 to 1892; but the main characteristic of
this period was a fierce revival of the land war. It was virulent in
Wexford, and in 1888 Redmond shared the experience which few Irish
members escaped or desired to escape; he was sentenced to imprisonment
on a charge of intimidation for a speech condemning some evictions. He
and his brother met in Wexford jail, and both used to describe with glee
their mutual salutation: "Good heavens, what a ruffian you look!"
Cropped hair and convict clothes were part of Mr. Balfour's resolute
government.

Yet in those days Ireland was winning, and winning fast. Mr. Gladstone's
personal ascendancy, never stronger than in the wonderful effort of his
old age, asserted itself more and more. Public sympathy in Great Britain
was turning against the wholesale evictions, the knocking down of
peasants' houses by police and military with battering-rams. The Tory
party sought for a new political weapon, and one day _The Times_ came
out with the facsimile of what purported to be a letter in Parnell's
hand. This document implied at least condonation of the Phoenix Park
murders.

Other letters equally incriminating were published. Parnell denied the
authorship, his denial was not accepted; fierce controversy ended in the
establishment of one of the strangest Commissions of Enquiry ever set
up--a semi-judicial tribunal of judges. Its proceedings created the
acutest public interest, drawn out over long months, up to the day when
Sir Charles Russell had before him in the witness-box the original
vendor of the letters--one Pigott. Pigott's collapse, confession of
forgery, flight and suicide, followed with appalling swiftness: and the
result was to generate through England a very strong sympathy for the
man against whom, and against whose followers, such desperate calumnies
had been uttered and exploited. Parnell's prestige was no longer
confined to his own countrymen: and the sense of all Home Rulers was
that they fought a winning battle, under two allied leaders of
extraordinary personal gifts.

Then, as soon as it was clear that the attack of the Pigott letters had
recoiled on those who launched it, came the indication of a fresh
menace. Proceedings for divorce were taken with Parnell as the
co-respondent: the case was undefended. Mr. Gladstone and probably most
Englishmen expected that Parnell would retire, at all events
temporarily, from public life, as, in Lord Morley's words, "any English
politician of his rank" would have been obliged to do. Parnell refused
to retire; and Gladstone made it publicly known that if Parnell
continued to lead the Irish party, his own leadership of the Liberal
party, "based, as it had been, mainly on the prosecution of the Irish
cause," would be rendered "almost a nullity." The choice--for it was a
choice--was left to the Irish. To retain Parnell as leader in
Gladstone's judgment made Gladstone's task impossible, and therefore
indicated Gladstone's withdrawal from public life. To part with Parnell
meant parting with the ablest leader that Nationalist Ireland had ever
found.

A more heartrending alternative has never been imposed on any body of
politicians, and John Redmond, unlike his younger brother, was not of
those to whom decision came by an instinctive act of allegiance. His
nature forced him to see both sides, but when he decided it was with his
whole nature. The issue was debated by the Irish party in Committee Room
15 of the House of Commons, with the Press in attendance. In this
encounter Redmond for the first time stepped to the front. He had
hitherto been outside the first flight of Irish parliamentarians. Now,
he was the first to state the case for maintaining Parnell's leadership,
and throughout the discussions he led on that side. When Parnell's death
came a few months after the "split" declared itself, there was no
hesitation as to which of the Parnellites should assume the leadership
of their party. Redmond resigned his seat in North Wexford and contested
Cork city, where Parnell had long been member. He was badly beaten, and
for some three months the new leader of the Parnellites was without a
seat in the House--though not during a session. Another death made a new
opening, and in December 1891 his fight at Waterford against no less a
man than Michael Davitt turned for a moment the electoral tide which was
setting heavily against the smaller group. It was a notable win, and the
hero of that triumph retained his hold on the loyalty of those with whom
he won it when the rest of Ireland had turned away from him. The tie
lasted to his death--and after it, for Waterford then chose as its
representative the dead leader's son, and renewed that choice in the
general election of 1918, when other allegiances to the old party were
like leaves on the wind.

Other ties were formed in these years, which lasted through Redmond's
life. I have deliberately abstained from entering into either the merits
or the details of the "split." But certain of its aspects must be
recognized. In the division into Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites,
Parnellites were a small but fierce minority. It needed resolution for a
man to be a Parnellite, all the more because the whole force of the
Catholic Church was thrown against them, and in some instances
disgraceful methods were used. One of Redmond's best friends was the
owner of a local newspaper; it was declared to be a mortal sin to buy,
sell, or read his journal. The business was reduced to the verge of ruin
but the man went on, till a new bishop came and gradually things mended.
He, like Redmond, was a staunch practising Catholic, and later on was
the friend and trusted associate of many priests; but he stood for an
element in Ireland which refused to allow the least usurpation by
ecclesiastical authority in the sphere of citizenship.

Willie Redmond won East Clare, as his brother won Waterford city, after
a turbulent election with the priests against him. He gave in that
contest, as always, at least as good as he got; but his collision with
individuals never affected his devotion or his brother's to their
Church.

But in social life the estrangements of these days were far-reaching,
and, at least negatively, so far as Redmond was concerned, they were
lasting. His existence had been saddened and altered shortly before the
break up by the death of his first wife, which left him a young widower
with three children. After the "split" the whole circle of friends among
whom he had lived in Dublin and in London was shattered and divided; and
in later life none, I think, of those broken intimacies was renewed.

In Redmond's nature there was a total lack of rancour. Clear-sighted as
he was, he realized how desperately difficult a choice was imposed on
Nationalists by Parnell's situation, and he knew how honestly men had
differed. He could command completely his intellectual judgment of their
action, and there were many whom in later stages of the movement he
trusted none the less for their divergence from him at this crisis. But
he was more than commonly a creature of instinct; and the associations
of his intimate life were all decided in these years. His affection was
given to those who were comrades in this pass of danger. The only two
exceptions to be made are, first and chiefly, Mr. Devlin, who was too
young to be actively concerned with politics at the time of Parnell's
overthrow; and, to speak truth, it is not possible to be so closely
associated as Redmond was with this lieutenant of his, or to be so long
and loyally served by him, and not to undergo his personal attraction.
The other exception is Mr. J.J. Mooney, who entered Parliament and
politics later than the "split," but whose personal allegiance to Mr.
Redmond was always declared. He acted for long as Redmond's secretary
and always as his counsellor--for in all the detail of parliamentary
business, especially on the side of private bill legislation, the House
had few more capable members. He was perhaps more completely than Mr.
Devlin one of the little group of intimates with whom Redmond loved to
surround himself in the country. All the rest were old champions of the
fight over Parnell's body; but by far the closest friend of all was his
brother Willie. Their marriages to kinswomen had redoubled the tie of
blood.

It should be noted here that Redmond married for the second time in
1899, after ten years of widowerhood. His wife was, by his wish and her
own, never at all in the public eye. All that should be said here is
that his friends found friendship with him easier and not more difficult
than before this marriage, and were grateful for the devoted care which
was bestowed upon their leader. She accompanied him on all his political
journeyings, whatever their duration, and gave him in the fullest
measure the companionship which he desired.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This speech is included in "Home Rule: Speeches of John
Redmond, M.P.," a volume edited in 1910 by Mr. Barry O'Brien. It
contains also the American addresses quoted in this chapter, and a
speech to the Dublin Convention in 1907, quoted in the next.]




CHAPTER II

REDMOND AS CHAIRMAN

I


The Parliament of 1892-5 was barren of results for Ireland, being
consumed by factious strife, at Westminster between the Houses and in
Ireland between the parties. With Gladstone's retirement it seemed as if
Home Rule were dead. But thinking men realized that the Irish question
was still there to be dealt with, and approach to solution began along
new lines. When Lord Salisbury returned to power in 1895, Land Purchase
was cautiously extended with much success: the Congested Districts
Board, originally established by Mr. Arthur Balfour, was showing good
results, and his brother Mr. Gerald Balfour, now Chief Secretary, felt
his way towards a policy which came to be described as "killing Home
Rule with kindness." A section of Irish Nationalist opinion was scared
by the menace contained in this epigram; and consequently, when in 1895
Mr. Horace Plunkett (as he then was) put forward proposals for a
conference of Irishmen to consider possible means for developing Irish
agriculture and Irish industries under the existing system, voices were
raised against what was denounced as a new attempt to divert Nationalist
Ireland from its main purpose of achieving self-government. Mr.
Plunkett's original proposal was that a body of four Anti-Parnellites,
two Parnellites and two Unionists should meet and deliberate in Ireland,
during the recess. In the upshot the Nationalist majority refused to
take any part; but Redmond, with one of his supporters, Mr. William
Field, served on the "Recess Committee" and concurred in its Report, out
of which came the creation of the Department of Agriculture and
Technical Instruction.

In 1896 the Commission on Financial Relations, which had been set up by
the Liberal Ministry in 1894, reported, and its findings produced a
state of feeling which for a moment promised co-operation between
divided interests in Ireland. Unionist magnates joined with Nationalists
in denouncing the system of taxation, which the Commission--by a
majority of eleven to two--had described as oppressive and unjust to the
weaker country.

Redmond was one of the members of this Commission, which included also
distinguished representatives of his Nationalist opponents--Mr. Blake
and Mr. Sexton; and he no doubt cherished hopes arising from the
resolute demands for redress uttered by Lord Castletown and other Irish
Unionist Peers. Those hopes were soon dispelled; nothing but much
controversy came of the demand for improved financial relations. Mr.
Gerald Balfour's schemes were more tangible, and in 1897 Redmond
announced that the Government's proposal to introduce a measure of Local
Government for Ireland should have his support. The Bill, when it came,
exceeded expectation in its scope, and Redmond gave it a cordial welcome
in the name of the Parnellites. The larger group, however, then led by
Mr. Dillon, declined to be responsible for accepting it.

Later, in the working of this measure, Redmond pressed strongly that
elections under it should not be conducted on party lines and that the
landlord class should be brought into local administrative work. His
advice unfortunately was not taken.

Then followed the South African struggle, and in giving voice to a
common sentiment against what Nationalist Ireland held to be an unjust
war the two Irish parties found themselves united and telling together
in the lobby. Formal union followed. By this time the cleavage between
Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite was less acute than that between Mr.
Healy's section and the followers of Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien. The
choice of Redmond as Chairman was due less to a sense of his general
fitness than to despair of reaching a decision between the claims of the
other three outstanding men.

The sacrifice to be made was made at Mr. Dillon's expense, and he did
not acquiesce willingly or cordially. The cordiality which ultimately
marked his relations with Redmond was of later growth--fostered by the
necessity which Mr. Dillon found imposed on him of defending loyally the
party's leader against attacks from the men who had been most active in
selecting him.

A part of the compact under which Redmond was elected to the chair
limited the power of the newly chosen. He was to be Chairman, not
leader; that is to say, he was not to act except after consultation with
the party as a whole: he was not to commit them upon policy. This meant
in practice that he acted as head of a cabinet, which from 1906 onwards
consisted of Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P. O'Connor--the last
representing not only a great personal parliamentary experience and
ability, but also the powerful and zealous organization of Irish in
Great Britain. Redmond adhered scrupulously to the spirit of this
compact. There was only one instance in which he took action without
consultation. But that instance was the most important of all--his
speech at the outbreak of the war.

Another thing which governed his conduct in the chair of the party, as
indeed it governed that of nearly all the rank and file, was his horror
of the years which Ireland had gone through since Parnell's fall. He
loathed faction and he had struggled through murky whirlpools of it; for
the rest of his life he was determined, almost at any cost, to maintain
the greatest possible degree of unity among Irish Nationalists. Yet in
the end he unhesitatingly made a choice and took an action which risked
dividing, and in the last event actually divided, Nationalist Ireland as
it had never been divided before. There were things for which he would
face even that supreme peril. Deep in his heart there was a vision which
compelled him. It was the vision of Ireland united as a whole.

All this, however, lay far in the future when he was elected to the
chair; for the moment his task was to reunite Irish Nationalists, and it
began prosperously. From the first his position was one of growing
strength. Irishmen all the world over were heartsick of faction and
rejoiced in even the name of unity. Redmond made it a reality. While
leading the little Parnellite party, reduced at last to nine, his line
of action was comparable to that pursued by Mr. William O'Brien from
1910 onwards. It had, to put things mildly, not been calculated to
assist the leader of the main Nationalist body. In 1904, Justin
McCarthy, then retired from politics, wrote in his book on _British
Political Parties_: "Parnell's chief lieutenant had shown in the service
of his chief an energy and passion which few of us expected of him, and
was utterly unsparing in his denunciations of the men who maintained the
other side of the controversy. From this it was not unnatural to expect
difficulties occasioned both by the leader's temper and by the temper of
those whom he led. But men who had been adverse assured me that they had
changed their opinions and were glad to find they could work with
Redmond in perfect harmony and that his manners and bearing showed no
signs whatever of any bitter memories belonging to the days of internal
dispute."

In truth, the man's nature was kindly and tolerant; courtesy came more
natural to him than invective. Above all, he was sensitive for the
reputation of his country in the eyes of the world, and the spectacle of
Irishmen heaping vilifications on each other always filled him with
distaste. Whether the taunts passed between Nationalist and Unionist or
Nationalist and Nationalist made little difference to his feeling. With
him it was no empty phrase that he regarded all Irishmen in equal degree
as his fellow-countrymen.

In 1902 he was once more a party to a continued effort made by Irishmen
outside of party lines to solve a part of the national difficulty. The
policy of land purchase had proved its immense superiority over that of
dual ownership and had even been introduced on a considerable scale. But
its very success led to trouble, because on one side of a boundary fence
there would be farmers who had purchased and whose annual instalments of
purchase money were lower than the rents paid by their neighbours on the
other side of the mearing. Renewed struggle against rent led to new
eviction scenes on the grand scale; and by this time landlord opinion
was half converted to the purchase policy, as a necessary solution. The
persistency of one young Galway man, Captain John Shawe Taylor, brought
about the famous Land Conference of 1902, in which Mr. O'Brien, Mr.
Healy, Mr. Redmond and Mr. T.W. Russell on behalf of the tenants met
Lord Dunraven, Lord Mayo, Colonel Hutcheson Poe and Colonel Nugent
Everard representing (though not officially) the landlord interest: and
the result of the agreement reached by this body was seen in Mr.
Wyndham's Land Purchase Act of 1903. This great and drastic measure
altered fundamentally the character of the Irish problem. Directly by
its own effect, and indirectly by the example of new methods, it changed
opinion alike in Ireland and Great Britain. In Ireland hitherto, as has
been already seen, resistance to Home Rule had come primarily from the
landlord class, by whom the Nationalist desire for self-government was
construed as a cloak for the wish to revive or reverse the ancient
confiscations. Now, the land question was by general consent settled, at
least in principle; in proportion as landlords were bought out the
leading economic argument against Home Rule disappeared. The opposition
reduced itself strictly to political grounds; and it began to be plain
that the true heart of resistance lay in Ulster.

Also, lines of cleavage in the Unionist camp began to appear. Already,
landlords in the South and West had found a common ground of action with
representatives of the tenants. It was felt, alike in Ireland and
England, that this precedent might be developed further.

In England political opinion was much affected by the apparent success
of an attempt to deal with the Irish problem piecemeal. The Congested
Districts Board had done much to relieve those regions where famine was
always a possibility; Local Government had given satisfactory results;
and now Land Purchase was hailed as the beginning of a new era. The idea
of seeing how much farther the principle of tentative approach could be
carried took strong hold of many minds, and the word "devolution" came
into fashion.

When it became known that Sir Antony MacDonnell, then Under-Secretary at
Dublin Castle, had, in consultation with Lord Dunraven, drafted a scheme
for transferring parts of Irish administration to a purely Irish
authority, a situation rapidly defined itself in which Ulster broke away
from the more liberal elements in Irish Unionism. The Ulster group
demanded and obtained the resignation of Mr. George Wyndham; they
demanded also the dismissal of the Under-Secretary. But Sir Antony
MacDonnell was not of a resigning temper; he had not acted without
authority, and he was defended zealously by the Irish members. The
section of Liberal opinion which adhered rather to Lord Rosebery than to
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman probably drew the conclusion that the Irish
party were prepared at least to tolerate the policy of approaching Home
Rule step by step; and beyond doubt they were impressed by the prestige
of Sir Antony MacDonnell's record and personality. The son of a small
Irish Catholic landlord, educated at the Galway College of the Queen's
University, he had entered the Indian Civil Service and in it risen to
the highest point of power. The recommendation that he should be brought
home to assist in the Government of Ireland had come from Lord
Lansdowne, then Governor-General of India, who knew that the famous
administrator of the Punjab was a Catholic Irishman of Nationalist
sympathies. He had been accepted by Mr. Wyndham, his official chief,
"rather as a colleague than as a subordinate." Officially and publicly,
the credit for the Land Act of 1903 went to the Chief Secretary, and Mr.
Wyndham deserves much of it. But no one who knew the two men could have
doubted that in the shaping of a measure involving so wide a range of
detail, the leading part must have been taken by the Irish Civil Servant
who in India had acquired most of his fame from a sweeping measure of
land reform.

Proposals to alter the method and conduct of Irish administration before
touching the parliamentary power to legislate and to tax came with
extraordinary weight in coming from such a man; and the history of the
previous Home Rule Bills was not encouraging to anyone, especially to
those who had been members of Mr. Gladstone's two last administrations.
From the time of the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question
had brought to Liberals nothing but embarrassment and embitterment. The
enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the
severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid
controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr.
Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics.
The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace
ruin to British prosperity; the banner of Free Trade offered a splendid
rallying-point for a party which had known fifteen years of dissension
and division. Prudent men thought it would be unsafe, unwise and
unpatriotic to compromise this great national interest by retaining the
old watch-word on which Gladstone had twice fought and twice been
beaten.

It was clear, too, that a Home Rule Bill would provoke a direct conflict
with the House of Lords and would raise that great struggle on not the
most favourable issue. Statesmen like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith
probably believed that a partial measure, an instalment of
self-government, to which some influential sections of the Tory party
would not be unfriendly, might have strong hopes of passing into law.

So it came to pass that in the election of 1906 the Liberal Party came
into power with a majority of unexampled magnitude, but with a
Government pledged, negatively, not to introduce a Home Rule Bill in
that Parliament, but, positively, to attempt an Irish settlement by the
policy of instalments.

In all this lay the seeds of trouble for the Irish leader. Liberals have
never understood that Ireland will not take from them what it would take
from the Tories. It will accept, as a palliative, from the party opposed
to Home Rule what it will not accept from those who have admitted the
justice of the national demand.


II

"For myself," said Redmond in his speech to the Irish Convention in May
1907, "I have always expressed in public and in private my opinion that
no half-way house on this question is possible; but at the same time I
am, or at any rate I try to be, a practical politician. In the lodgment
this idea of instalments had got in the minds of English statesmen I
recognized the fact--and after all in politics the first essential is to
recognize facts--I recognized the fact that in this Parliament we were
not going to get a pure Home Rule Bill offered, and I consented, and I
was absolutely right in consenting, that whatever scheme short of that
was put forward would be considered calmly on its merits."

This meant that during the whole of the year 1906 and a part of 1907 the
proposal of the new Irish Bill was under discussion with the Irish
leaders. The course of these deliberations was undoubtedly a
disappointment. Mr. Bryce was replaced by Mr. Birrell as Chief
Secretary, but the scheme still fell short of what Redmond had hoped to
attain. Unfortunately, and it was a characteristic error, his sanguine
temperament had led him to encourage in Ireland hopes as high as his
own. The production of the Irish Council Bill and its reception in
Ireland was the first real shock to his power.

Mr. Birrell in introducing the measure spoke with his eye on the Tories
and the House of Lords. He represented it as only the most trifling
concession; he emphasized not the powers which it conveyed but the
limitations to them. Redmond in following him was in a difficult
position. He stressed the point that to accept a scheme which by reason
of its partial nature would break down in its working would be ruinous,
because failure would be attributed to natural incapacity in the Irish
people. Acceptance, therefore, he said, could not be unconditional and
undoubtedly to his mind it was conditioned by his hope of securing
certain important amendments, which he outlined. None the less, the tone
of his speech was one of acceptance, and he concluded:

     "I have never in all the long years that I have been in this House
     spoken under such a heavy sense of responsibility as I am speaking
     on this measure this afternoon. Ever since Mr. Gladstone's Bill of
     1886 Ireland has been waiting for some scheme to settle the
     problem--waiting sometimes in hope, sometimes almost in despair;
     but the horrible thing is this, that all the time that Ireland has
     been so waiting there has been a gaping wound in her side, and her
     sons have had to stand by helpless while they saw her very
     life-blood flowing out. Who can say that is an exaggeration? Twenty
     years of resolute government by the party above the gangway have
     diminished the population of Ireland by a million. No man in any
     position of influence can take upon himself the awful
     responsibility of despising and putting upon one side any device
     that may arrest that hemorrhage, even although he believed, as I
     do, that far different remedies must be applied before Ireland can
     stand upon her feet in vigorous strength. We are determined, as far
     as we are concerned, that these other remedies shall be applied;
     but in the meantime we should shrink from the responsibility of
     rejecting anything which, after that full consideration which the
     Bill will receive, seems to our deliberate judgment calculated to
     relieve the sufferings of Ireland and hasten the day of her full
     national convalescence."

There is no doubt that the element in him which urged him to welcome
anything that could set Irishmen working together on Irish problems made
it almost impossible for him to throw aside this chance. It was clear to
me also that by long months of work in secret deliberation the proposals
originally set out had been greatly altered, so much so that in
surveying the Bill he was conscious mainly of the improvements in it;
and that in this process his mind had lost perception of how the measure
was likely to affect Irish opinion--especially in view of his own
hopeful prognostications. At all events, the reception of Mr. Birrell's
speech, even by Redmond's own colleagues, marked a sudden change in the
atmosphere. Some desired to vote at once against the measure; many were
with difficulty brought into the lobby to support even the formal stage
of first reading. In Ireland there was fierce denunciation. A Convention
was called for May 21st. The crowd was so great that many of us could
not make our way into the Mansion House; and Redmond opened the
proceedings by moving the rejection of the Bill. In the interval since
the debate he had been confronted with a definite refusal to concede the
amendments for which he asked.

These were mainly two, of principle: for the objection taken to the
finance of the Bill was a detail, though of the first importance. The
Bill proposed to hand over the five great departments of Irish
administration to the control of an Irish Council. The decisions of that
Council were to be subject to the veto of the Lord-Lieutenant, as are
the decisions of Parliament to the veto of the Crown. But the Bill
proposed not merely to give to the Viceroy the power of vetoing proposed
action but of instituting other action on his own initiative. Secondly,
the Council was to exercise its control through Committees, each of
which was to have a paid chairman, nominated by the Crown.

"It would be far better," Redmond had said in the House of Commons, "to
have one man selected as the chairmen of these committees are to be
selected, to have charge, so far as the Council is concerned, of the
working of the Department, and then all these chairmen acting together
could form a sort of organic body which would give cohesion, would
co-ordinate and give stability to the whole of the work. I am afraid
that the Government seem to have shrunk from that for fear the argument
would be used against them that they were really creating a Ministry."

That was the real difficulty. A Council subject only to a veto on its
acts, even though it could neither pass a by-law nor strike a rate,
would undoubtedly be said by the Unionist opposition to be a rudimentary
parliament. A group of chairmen possessing administrative powers like
those of Ministers would be labelled a Ministry; and the Liberals who
had pledged themselves not to give effect to their Home Rule principles
were sensitive to charges of breach of faith.

It is a curious fact in politics that the public promise conveyed in
the adoption of certain principles is generally taken to be on the level
of ordinary commercial obligation. Failure to keep it jeopardizes a
man's reputation for political stability, just as failure to pay a
tailor's bill imperils a man's financial character. But a promise to
political opponents that you will not give effect to your principles
stands on the level of a card debt: it is a matter of honour to make
good; and on this point Mr. Asquith in particular has always shown an
adamantine resolution.

From 1907 onwards it was with Mr. Asquith that Redmond had chiefly to
count. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who, personally, had given no such
limiting pledges, and who during his two years of leadership commanded a
respect, an affectionate allegiance, from his followers in the House
without parallel at all events since Mr. Gladstone's day, was fast
weakening in health. He lived long enough to give freedom to South
Africa, the one outstanding achievement of that Parliament; and by the
success of that great measure he did more to remove British distrust of
Home Rule than even Gladstone ever accomplished. It was no fault of his
if Liberalism failed to settle the Irish question at the moment when
Liberal power reached its highest point.

The failure of the Council Bill had one good result, and one only. It
cleared the way for a definite propaganda on Home Rule. But before this
could be undertaken it was necessary to pull Nationalist Ireland
together, for it was once more rent with division and distrust. Mr.
Healy, who in 1901 had been expelled from the Irish party and its
organization on the motion of Mr. O'Brien and against Redmond's advice,
and Mr. O'Brien, who had subsequently retired from the party against
Redmond's wish, were both of them formidable antagonists; and each was
vehement in attack on the main body of Nationalists and their leader. It
was some time before Redmond braced himself to the struggle; but from
the opening of the autumn recess in 1907 he undertook a campaign
throughout Ireland which it would be difficult to overpraise. In a
series of speeches at chosen centres, delivered before great audiences,
he laid down once more the national demand as he conceived it; and in
each speech he dealt with a different aspect of the case for Home Rule.

A formal outcome of this campaign was the re-establishment of national
unity. Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Healy returned to the Irish party for a brief
period. But the more important result was the re-establishment of
Redmond's personal position. He had made an effort which would have been
great for any man, but for him was a victory over his own temperament.
That temperament had in it, negatively, a great lack of personal
ambition and, positively, a strong love for a quiet life. He did his
work in Parliament regularly and conscientiously, always there day in
and day out; and it was work of a very exacting kind. This had become
the routine of his existence and he did it without strain. But to go
outside it was for him always an effort. He hated town life; but more
than this, he hated ceremonies, presentations, receptions in hotels, and
all the promiscuous contact of political gatherings. Nevertheless, when
he came to such an occasion no living man acquitted himself better.
Apart from his oratory, he had an admirable manner, a dignified yet
friendly courtesy which gained attachment. In the course of the autumn
and winter following the Irish Council Bill he must have met and been
seen by a hundred times more of his adherents than in any similar period
of his leadership. People all over Ireland heard him not only on the
public platform but in small addresses to deputations, in impromptu
speeches at semi-public dinners, and all of this strengthened him where
an Irish leader most needs to be strengthened--in the hearts of the
people. The hold which he gained then stood to him during the years
which followed and up to the outbreak of the war. But it could have
been still further strengthened, and if ambition had been a motive force
in him, he would have strengthened it. More than that, if he had
realized his full value to Ireland, he would have felt it his duty to do
so. Modesty, combined with a certain degree of indolence, made him leave
all that contact with the mass of his followers which is necessary to
leadership to be effected through his chief colleagues, Mr. Dillon and
Mr. Devlin--who, through no will of theirs, became rather joint leaders
than lieutenants, so far as Ireland was concerned.

Circumstances helped to emphasize this tendency. His work lay very
greatly in London, Parliament occupied every year a longer and longer
space. The task of platform advocacy all over England was urgent, and in
England Redmond stood out alone. It was little to be wondered at that
when each long deferred recess came he made it a vacation and not a
change of work. The seclusion from direct intercourse with the mass of
his followers which conditions imposed upon him was further accentuated
by his personal tastes and his choice of a dwelling.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the mountain range which
runs along the east coast from outside Dublin through Wicklow into
county Wexford was a country difficult of access and unsubdued. Here in
1803 Emmet found a refuge, and after Emmet's death here Michael Dwyer
still held out: Connemara itself was hardly wilder or less accessible,
till the "military road" was run, little more than a hundred years ago,
from Dublin over the western slopes of Featherbed, past Glencree, and
through Callary Bog, skirting Glendalough and traversing the wild
recesses of Glenmalure, so that it cuts across the headwaters of those
beautiful streams which meet in the Vale of Ovoca. From Glenmalure the
road climbs a steep ridge and then travels in wide downward curves
across the seaward side of Lugnaquilla--fifth in height among Irish
mountains. Here, at the head of a long valley which runs down to the
Meeting of the Waters, was built one of the barracks which billeted the
original garrison of the road. Later, these buildings had been used for
constabulary; but with peaceful times this grew needless, for there was
little disturbance among these Wicklow folk, tenants of little farms,
each with a sheep-run on the vast hills. Nothing could be less like the
flat sea-bordering lands of the Barony of Forth in which the Redmonds
spent their boyhood than these wild, sweeping, torrent-seamed folds of
hill and valley; but the place came to him as part of his inheritance
from "the Chief." Parnell's home at Avondale was some ten miles from
here, lying in woods beside the Ovoca River; but the Parnell property
stretched up to the slopes of Lugnaquilla, and the dismantled barrack
was used by him as a shooting lodge. Here, in the early days before his
life became absorbed in the masterful attachment which led finally to
his overthrow, he spent good hours; and here the two Redmonds and those
others of his followers who were his companions came to camp roughly in
this strange, gaunt survival of military rule. After Parnell's death
Redmond bought the barrack and a small plot of land about it, and it
became increasingly and exclusively his home in Ireland. It was, indeed,
Ireland itself for him. In it and through it he knew Ireland intimately,
felt Ireland intensely and intensively, not only as a place, but as a
way of being. Ireland to him meant Aughavanagh.

Partly, no doubt, the almost unbroken wildness of his surroundings
appealed to an element of romance in his character, which was strongly
emotional though extremely reticent. Only an artist would have
recognized beauty in those scenes, for in all Ireland it would be
difficult to find a landscape with less amenity; the hill shapes are
featureless, without boldness or intricacy of line. Redmond, a born
artist in words, possessing strongly the sense of form, was sensitive to
beauty in all kinds--yet rather to the beauty that is symmetrical,
graceful and well-planned. A sailor does not love the sea for its
beauty, and Redmond loved Ireland as a sailor loves the sea--yet with a
difference. Ireland to him in a great measure was Aughavanagh, and
Aughavanagh was a place of rest. Ireland is a good country to rest in.
But it would have been far better for Redmond and for Ireland if Ireland
had been the place not of his rest, but of his work.

His work was essentially that of an agent of Ireland carrying on
Ireland's affairs in a strange capital. He spent more of his time in
London than in Ireland, but he was never part of the life of London,
never in any sense a Londoner. He was part of the life of the House of
Commons, for that was his place of work; and when he left it he went to
Aughavanagh as a man returns from the City to his home. This home of his
was in no sense connected with his active occupations. He was no lover
of gardening or of farming; he had none of the Irishman's taste for the
overseeing of stock or land; he enjoyed shooting, but he was not a
passionate sportsman. What was a passion with him--- for he sacrificed
much to it--was rest in the place of his choice.

It was not a lonely habitation. He was no recluse, and when there he was
always surrounded by his friends. I do not know precisely how one could
constitute a list of them--but half a dozen men at least came and went
there as they chose. Mr. Mooney, Mr. Hayden, "Long John" O'Connor, Dr.
Kenny--these, and above all, Paddy O'Brien, the party's chief acting
whip--were constant there. Some came to shoot, and Willie Redmond used
to come over from his house at Delgany, where the Glen of the Downs
debouches seaward; walking generally, for he was the fastest and most
untiring of mountaineers: very few cared to keep beside him on the
hills. Others were content to share the daily bathes, morning and
afternoon, in a long deep pool where the little stream tumbling down a
series of cascades makes a place to dive and swim in. These were the
friends of Redmond's own generation, and they were also his son's
friends; but the two daughters had their allies, and one way or another
the party was apt to be a big one--very simply provided for. When I went
there first (in 1907) you climbed a narrow stone stair to the first
floor; on the left was a dining-room, beyond that a billiard-room; on
the right, Redmond's study, and beyond that his bedroom. Another flight
took you to the upper regions, where were two dormitories--the girls to
the right, the men to the left. Later, he made some alterations, and the
upstair rooms were subdivided off; the garden was developed; it became
more of a house and less of a barrack; but the character of the life did
not change. It was most simple, most hospitable, most unconventional and
most remote.

Certainly a great part of Aughavanagh's charm for him lay in its
remoteness. It was seven Irish miles up a hilly road from the nearest
railway station, post office or telegraph station. Aughrim was three
hours' train journey from Dublin, on a tiny branch line, and trains were
few. Until motors brought him (to his intense resentment) within reach,
he was as inaccessible as if he had lived in Clare or Mayo.

So it came to pass that though he knew to the very core one typical
district of Ireland, and was far more closely in touch with a few score
of Irish peasants through their daily life than any of his leading
associates, he was yet cut off by his own choice from much that is
Ireland--and perhaps from much that was most important to him. Political
opinion is created in the towns, and he knew the Irish townsfolk, so far
as he could manage it, only through his correspondence, and through
those business visits to Dublin which he made as few as possible.

If his work had lain, where it should by rights have lain, in a
ministerial office in Dublin, all would have been well. As it was, the
deliberate and extreme seclusion of his life in Ireland weakened his
influence. He was far too shrewd not to know this, and far too
unambitious to care. Work he never shrank from. But the daily
solicitations of people with personal grievances to lay before him,
personal interests which they desired him to promote, made a form of
trouble which in his periods of rest from work he refused to undergo.

The same qualities in him were responsible for his persistent refusal to
accept private hospitality where he went on public business. Whether in
Ireland or in Great Britain, he must stay at a hotel, and many were the
magnates of Liberalism whose ruffled feelings it was necessary to smooth
down on this account. He detested being lionized and wanted always, when
the public affair was over, to get away to his own quarters.

The demands on him in England for platform work were portentous. Every
constituency which wanted a meeting on the Home Rule question wanted
Redmond and no other speaker. Of course he could not go to one-twentieth
of the places where he was asked for; and his objection to going was not
the effort involved but the impossibility either of indefinitely
repeating himself or of finding something new to say each time. "If it
was in America," he would say, "I would speak as often as you asked me"
(it was my misfortune to have to do the asking), "because they never
report a speech." The fact is worth noting, for in scores of instances
what was adduced by opponents as quotation from his utterances in the
United States represented simply some American journalist's impression,
perhaps less of what Redmond said than of what, in the reporter's
opinion, he should have said. Those who represented him as putting one
face on the argument in America and another in Great Britain did not
know the man. "I have made it a rule," he said to me more than once, "to
say the extremest things I had to say in the House of Commons."

However, all the machinery which was employed by the opponents of Home
Rule to prejudice Ireland's case in the British constituencies proved
very ineffectual. For one thing, the lesson of South Africa had gone
home. For another, and perhaps a greater, no cause ever had a missionary
better adapted to the temperament of the British democracy. The dignity
and beauty of Redmond's eloquence, the weight which he could give to an
argument, his extraordinary gift for simplifying an issue and grouping
thoughts in large bold masses--all these things carried audiences with
them.


III

Between 1908 and 1910 we were still, though with rapidly increasing
success, trying to get a hearing for the Irish question--trying to push
it once more to the front. The change of leadership from Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman to Mr. Asquith had damped Liberal enthusiasm. We got
solid work done for Ireland in the University Act of 1908, though
Redmond would have preferred a university of the residential type, like
that in which he had himself been an undergraduate. A highly contentious
measure was also carried in the Land Act of 1909. But a new power was
coming to the front, at once assisting and thwarting our efforts. Mr.
Lloyd George put a new fighting spirit into Liberalism: but the objects
which he had at heart could only be achieved by a great expenditure of
electoral power, and among those objects Irish self-government found
only a secondary place. When Mr. Gladstone spoke of liberty he thought
of what he had helped to bring to Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and
Montenegro--what he had tried to bring to Ireland. When Mr. Lloyd George
spoke of liberty, he thought of what he wanted to bring to England
first, and to Ireland by the way; his conviction that Ireland needed
self-government was not so deeply rooted as his conviction that the poor
throughout the United Kingdom needed help.

Old Age Pensions had been popular, but had not been a fighting issue.
Mr. Lloyd George provided the fighting issue with a vengeance when he
set himself to pay for them. Unfortunately, Nationalist Ireland had no
enthusiasm for the Budget which English Radicalism made its flag. A
country of peasant proprietors was easily scared by the very name of
land taxes. But above all the Finance Bill dealt drastically, and many
thought unfairly, with the powerful liquor trade, which in its branches
of brewing and distilling included the main manufacturing interest of
southern Ireland, and on its retail side was incredibly diffused through
the whole shopkeeping community.

The dissident Nationalists saw their chance. Mr. O'Brien emerged from
one of his periodic retirements to lead a whirlwind campaign against the
"robber Budget." Redmond and our party were obliged to oppose a measure
which pressed so hard as this undoubtedly did on Ireland. Our opposition
to the land taxes was withdrawn when valuable concessions had been made,
but no such compromise was considered possible on the liquor taxes. On
the other hand, it grew clear that the measure was likely to produce a
conflict in which the power of the House of Lords might be challenged on
the most favourable ground: and for that reason, when the third reading
was reached, the Irish party abstained from voting against it. This
course, while it facilitated close co-operation with Liberalism in the
general election which followed, weakened us in Ireland; and eleven out
of the eighty-three Nationalist members returned in January 1910 ranked
themselves as outside the party; though Mr. O'Brien's actual following
was limited to seven Cork members and Mr. Healy.


IV

The action of the Lords in rejecting the Budget of 1909 had an important
personal result. It placed Mr. Asquith in a rôle which no one was ever
better qualified to fill--that of a Liberal statesman defending
principles of democratic control menaced after a long period of
security. The Prime Minister, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now
became the protagonist; and this was to Redmond's liking, for he felt
that Mr. Asquith was more concerned with the problems which had occupied
Gladstone's closing years and Mr. Lloyd George with those of a later
day.

Yet in the first grave encounter after the rejection of the Budget,
Redmond and the leader of the Liberal party came to sharp differences.
The general election had amply justified the advice which was urged by
him on Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman when the House of Lords rejected the
Education Bill in 1906--namely, that the Liberal party should take up at
once the inevitable fight before their enormous strength had been
frittered away in a series of disappointments. The majority of 1906 was
too swollen to be healthy: owing to the ruling out of Home Rule, it
included a number of men only partial adherents of the full Liberal
programme; and a diminution of its proportions owing to the traditional
swing of the pendulum was certain. But in January 1910 the losses were
more than even sanguine Tory prophets predicted. Tories came back equal
in strength to the Liberals: Labour was only forty, so that the Irish
party held the balance in the House.

The election had been fought expressly on the issue of Government's
claim to enable a Liberal Government to deal with certain problems,
among which the Irish question occupied the foremost place. It was easy
now for the Tories to argue that the Government appealing to the country
on that issue had lost two hundred seats. They said: "You have authority
to pass your Budget--but for these vast unconstitutional changes you
have no mandate." The temper of their party, which had more than doubled
its numbers, was very high: in the Liberal ranks depression reigned and
counsels were divided.

At the beginning of the election Mr. Asquith had made a great speech in
the Albert Hall in which he outlined the Liberal policy. In it he
declared that the pledge against introducing a Home Rule Bill was
withdrawn, and that the establishment of self-government for Ireland,
subject to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, was among the
Government's main purposes. But the House of Lords was in the way.

"We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office unless we can
secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the
legislative utility and honour of the party of progress."

This was universally taken to mean that he would obtain a guarantee that
the King would, if necessary, consent to the creation of sufficient new
peers to override the hostile majority. But as the election progressed,
uncertainties developed and an alternative policy of attempting to
reform the Upper House was advocated in certain quarters. The question
arose also as to whether the first business of the new House should be
to pass the Budget which the Lords had thrown out or to proceed with the
attack on the power of veto.

Redmond's view on this was not in doubt. At a meeting in Dublin on
February 10, 1910, he declared in the most emphatic manner that to deal
with the Budget first would be a breach of Mr. Asquith's pledge to the
country, since it would throw away the power of the House of Commons to
stop supply. This speech attracted much attention, and the memory of it
was present to many a fortnight later when Mr. Asquith was replying to
Mr. Balfour at the opening of the debate on the Address. The Prime
Minister dwelt strongly on the administrative necessity for regularizing
the financial position disturbed by the Upper House's unconstitutional
action. He indicated also the need for reform in the composition of that
House. But, above all, he disclaimed as improper and impossible any
attempt to secure in advance a pledge for the contingent exercise of the
Royal prerogative.

"I have received no such guarantee and I have asked for no such
guarantee," he said.

The change was marked indeed from the moment when he uttered in the
Albert Hall his sentence against assuming office or holding office
without the necessary safeguards--an assurance at which the whole vast
assembly rose to their feet and cheered. Every word in his speech on the
Address added to the depression of his followers and the elation of the
Opposition. Redmond followed him at once. In such circumstances as then
existed, it was exceedingly undesirable for the Irish leader to
emphasize the fact that his vote could overthrow the Government: and the
least unnecessary display of this power would naturally and properly
have been resented by the Government's following. No one knew this
better than Redmond, yet the position demanded bold action. His speech,
courteous, as always, in tone, and studiously respectful in its
reference to the position of the Crown, was an open menace to the
Government. He quoted the Prime Minister's words at the Albert Hall, he
appealed to the House at large for the construction which had been
everywhere put on them; and it was apparent that he had the full
sympathy not only of his own party and of Labour, but of most of Mr.
Asquith's own following. He concluded in these words:

     "If the Prime Minister is not in a position to say that he has such
     guarantees as are necessary to enable him to pass a Veto Bill this
     year, and if in spite of that he intends to remain in office and
     proposes to pass the Budget into law and then to adjourn--I do not
     care for how short or how long--the consideration of the Bill
     dealing with the veto of the House of Lords, that is a policy which
     Ireland cannot and will not support."

The effect on the House was such that no one rose to continue the
debate. Next day it was resumed, and not only Labour speakers, but one
after another of the Liberals, including some of the Prime Minister's
most docile, old-fashioned supporters rose and declared that Redmond and
not the Leader of the House had expressed their views. So began a
remarkable struggle in which the combined forces of the private
members--Liberal, Labour and Irish--united by a common desire to destroy
the domination of the Peers, contended against the Cabinet's policy of
attempting not merely to limit the power of veto but to reconstitute the
Upper House. In such a process men saw that the driving force of the
majority would waste away and that the composite character of their
alliance would lead to certain disruption.

Before the debate on the Address concluded it was plain that Redmond had
won. From that period onwards his popularity, and, through him, the
popularity of the party which he led, was immensely increased in Great
Britain. He was regarded as one of the men who had rendered best service
to democracy against privilege. He himself believed that in this first
contest Ireland had decided the victory--had decided the overthrow of
the House which had so long opposed its liberties. Labour had then
neither the essential leader nor the necessary parliamentary strength:
Liberalism was confused and uncertain at the critical moment.

Yet in the very process of achieving this success Redmond laid himself
open to attack. The Budget was regarded with dislike by a very large
section of Irishmen, and apart from considerations of political strategy
the Irish members would certainly have voted against it. Now, the power
was in their hands to defeat it finally. By so doing they would, of
course, justify to some degree the unconstitutional action of the Lords;
but this consideration did not weigh with Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Healy.
They accused Redmond of selling the real interests of Ireland to keep a
Government in office which could offer nothing in return but a gambling
chance of limiting the veto of the Lords. Mr. O'Brien was firmly
confident that no such measure would ever pass. He denounced the
bargain, not merely because it was a bargain in which Redmond accepted
what was in his view a ruinous injustice to Ireland, but because it was
a bargain in which the Irish had been outwitted. This line of argument
was to be dinned into the ears of Ireland during all the remaining years
of Redmond's life. The only conclusive answer to it was to gain Home
Rule. If, in the long run, it came to appear that the attackers had been
right in their contention, and that Ireland had never received the
expected return, the fault for that result lay with Ireland itself no
less than with England; it most assuredly did not lie with John Redmond.
A great weight of responsibility rests on those who from the first hour
of Ireland's opportunity ingeminated distrust to an over-suspicious
people.

For the moment, however, the attack made no headway. Irishmen have a
shrewd political sense, and they felt that in the struggle to pin
Liberal Ministers to the true fighting objective Redmond had won. They
were also delighted to see the Irish party openly exert its power--not
quite realizing that such exhibitions were against the interest of the
democratic alliance, which had to undergo a grave test. The Government's
vacillation had rendered another general election necessary if the Veto
question were to be fought out.

On April 29th the House adjourned for the Whitsuntide recess, after
which the crisis was to come with the decision of the House of Lords
whether to accept or reject the Veto Resolution, which had then passed
the Commons. On May 7th, after a short and sudden illness, King Edward
died. Both the great English parties were unwilling to renew the most
acute political struggle of modern times at the opening of a new reign,
and means of accommodation was sought through a Conference which sat
first on June 16th and held twenty-one meetings. No representative of
Ireland was on this body. On November 10th it reported that no result
had come of its efforts, and a new general election was fixed for
December 1st.

When the Conference finally broke down Redmond was on his way back from
America, whither he had gone accompanied by Mr. Devlin. Mr. T.P.
O'Connor at the same time undertook a tour in Canada. The success of
these missions showed that the interest and the confidence of the Irish
race were higher than at any previous period: the ambassadors brought
back a contribution of one hundred thousand dollars to the election
funds, and the ship on which they came was saluted by bonfires all along
the coast of Cork. Ireland, too, was subscribing as Ireland had not
subscribed since Parnell's zenith: and this was an Ireland in which the
land-hunger had been largely appeased. The theory that Ireland's demand
for self-government was merely generated by Ireland's poverty began to
look ridiculous.

It was the cue of the Tory Press at this moment to excite prejudice
against the Liberals by representing them as the bondslaves of the
"dollar dictator"--ordered about by an Irish autocrat with swollen
money-bags from New York. This line of argument did us little harm in
Great Britain; in Ireland it improved Redmond's position, for it was a
useful answer to Mr. O'Brien's representation of him as the abject tool
of Liberal politicians. The election, on the whole, strengthened our
party. Mr. Healy was thrown out; and Mr. O'Brien, though he retained the
seven seats held by his adherents in Cork, failed in two out of three
personal candidatures.

In Great Britain the second election of the year 1910 had the surprising
result of reproducing almost exactly the same division of parties: and
this added greatly to the strength of the Government. The Tory leaders
now, instead of insisting on a maintenance of the old Constitution, went
into alternative proposals--including the adoption of the Referendum.
This was their constructive line; the destructive resolved itself
largely into an endeavour to focus resistance on the question of
Ireland--the purpose for which alone, they said, abolition of the veto
was demanded. As has often happened, action taken by the Vatican gave
the opponents of Home Rule a useful weapon. The _Ne Temere_ decree,
promulgated in the year 1908, laid down that any marriage to which a
Roman Catholic was a party, if not solemnized according to the rites of
the Church of Rome, should be treated as invalid from a canonical point
of view. Although legally binding, it should be regarded as no marriage
in the eyes of an orthodox Roman Catholic until it was regularized in
the manner provided by the Church, The case of an unhappy mixed marriage
in Belfast was exploited with fury on a thousand platforms. Another
decree, the _Motu Proprio_, was construed as seeking to establish
immunity for the clergy from proceedings in civil courts. This, however,
was of less platform value, because no instance could be found of a
practical application; whereas the McCann case unquestionably gave Tory
disputants a formidable instrument for evoking the ancient distrust of
Roman Catholicism which is so deeply ingrained in the Protestant mind.

In spite of all, the English democracy remained steady in its purpose.
Party feeling, however, ran to heights not known in living memory. In
July 1911 the Parliament Bill went to the Lords, where it was altered
out of all recognition. On July 20th Mr. Asquith sent a letter to Mr.
Balfour stating that the King had guaranteed that he would exercise his
prerogative to secure that the Bill should be passed substantially as it
left the Commons. On the 24th the extreme section of the Tory party,
headed by Lord Hugh Cecil, refused to allow the Prime Minister a hearing
in the House of Commons.

From an Irish point of view the episode was noteworthy. At the outset of
this critical session Redmond had cautioned his party to abstain from
giving provocation and from allowing themselves to be provoked. The
counsel was the harder to follow because some of the most vehement of
the younger Tories sat below the gangway, almost in physical contact
with Irish members, and hot words passed. Still, it was grounded into
all that we should not allow the great issue then at trial to be
represented as an Irish quarrel. Our cause was linked with the whole
cause of democracy as against privilege: it was an issue for the whole
United Kingdom; and that was never plainer than on this day of July.
English, Scottish and Welsh members hurled interruptions and taunts at
each other across the floor of the House, while Irish members sat
watching. Something older and more far-reaching than the opposition to
Ireland's demand now was felt itself assailed; and a force in which the
Irish movement was only one stream of many swept against it. Anger in
the Tory party was not directed against Ireland's representatives; and
an odd chance made this plain. The fierce scene in the House reached its
culmination when Ministers withdrew in a body from the Treasury Bench
and the two sides of the House stood up, one cheering, the other
hooting, in opposite ranks. For a moment it seemed as if the affair
would come to blows, till Mr. Will Crooks, with a genial inspiration,
uplifted his voice in song: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot?" The
tension was relaxed and members moved out in groups--we Irishmen
necessarily among the Tories. In the movement I saw Willie Redmond go up
to one of the fiercest among the Ulstermen, whose face was dark with
passion. Colloquy began: "Isn't it a hard thing that you wouldn't let us
speak?" The Ulsterman turned: "Not let you speak? My dear fellow, we'd
listen to you for as long as you liked--it's only these accursed English
Liberals." And upon this mutual understanding the two Irishmen walked
down the floor into the Lobby exchanging expressions of mutual goodwill
and possibly of mutual comprehension.

This little piece of by-play, so full of Irish nature, struck me at the
time as something more than amusing--as having in it a ray of hopeful
significance. But the most sanguine imagination would never have
foreseen the series of events which brought it to pass, not merely that
these two men should wear the same uniform, on a common service, but
that the same Gazette should publish both their names as enrolled on the
same day in the French Legion of Honour. On that day Mr. Charles Craig
was a prisoner in Germany, wounded in a famous fight; and Willie Redmond
was in a grave towards which Ulster comrades had been the first to carry
him. There is an Irish saying, "Men may meet, but the mountains stand
apart." In July 1911 such an association as the Gazette of July 1917
illustrated would have seemed hardly more possible than the meeting of
the everlasting hills.

The dramatic crisis of the parliamentary struggle between the two Houses
of Parliament did not, and could not, come in the House of Commons. Its
place was in the final citadel of privilege, and privilege surrendered
on August 10th, when the Bill passed the Lords after the most exciting
and uncertain division that is ever likely to be known. But there were
elements in the Tory party which did not accept defeat, though they had
not yet clearly decided on what battleground to renew their efforts. For
the moment, however, men were disposed to pause and take stock of the
new situation.

But at such a time events cannot stand still, and almost at the same
moment as the Parliament Act was carried, the Government took a step
which gravely affected the Irish party. Payment of members was
established by a resolution of the House of Commons.

Irish Nationalist members had always been paid from the party fund, that
is to say, by their supporters. Payment was conditional, not of right,
and it was not made except when the member was in attendance: it
amounted only to twenty pounds a month. The new payment came from the
British Treasury; it was made irrespective of the desire of
constituents, or of any other consideration; and it amounted to a sum
which in a country of small incomes sounded very imposing.
Unquestionably the receipt of it weakened the position of the party in
the eyes of Ireland, and gave a new sting to the charge of a bargain.

All this was clearly discerned in advance, by no one more than by
Redmond; and an amendment was moved to strike Irish members out of the
application of the resolution. But the situation was hopelessly
involved, the Irish party having repeatedly voted for payment of members
as part of the Radical programme which they supported as affecting any
normally governed country; and Government refused to make the exception.

As a result, Redmond's following lost much of the prestige which had
resulted from scrupulous observance of the understanding that no
Nationalist member should take office under Government. To join the
Irish party had been, in effect, for most men, to make a vow of
poverty. Now, on the contrary, it involved acceptance of what was in
Ireland's eyes a well-paid and unlaborious office. The Irish are no less
prone than any other nation to take a cynical view of these matters.

Yet assuredly no man ever gave more service for less pay than the
Nationalist leader, and it was the harder because he was a man who liked
comfort and had no ambition. If at the time of the great "split" he had
stood down from politics, success would have been assured to him at the
Bar in Ireland, or, more surely still, and far more profitably, at
Westminster itself. There never was anyone so well-fitted for the work
of a parliamentary barrister who has to deal with great interests before
a tribunal largely composed of laymen. No one had the House of Commons
tone more perfectly than Redmond, and no one that I ever heard equalled
his gift for making a complicated issue appear simple. When he was
thrown out of Parliament at the Cork election, he thought of retirement,
mainly for one reason: it would be better for his children. Yet, first
by personal loyalty to Parnell, later by his loyalty to Ireland, he was
held firm to his task--always a poor man, always knowing that it lay in
his power, without the least sacrifice of principle, to become rich by a
way of work less laborious and infinitely less harassing than that which
he pursued.

The effect upon the Irish situation produced by the payment of members
was slow to develop, and obscure. But an obvious and grave complication
was introduced into both British and Irish politics at the moment when
the democratic alliance had achieved its first great objective.
Parliament had been in session almost continuously since the beginning
of 1909, with the added strain of two general elections thrown in. There
was a widespread desire to clear the autumn of 1911, so that members
might have some breathing space, and, not less important, devote
themselves to propagandist work in their constituencies for the new
struggle of carrying measures under the hardly won Parliament Act. Each
of these measures must involve a fight prolonged over three years.

But this desire ran against the purposes of Mr. Asquith's chief
lieutenant, whose power and popularity were now at their height. Mr.
Lloyd George in the course of the session had introduced his Insurance
Bill, and it was welcomed with astonishing effusion from both sides of
the House. As discussion proceeded, however, the complexity and
difficulty of its proposals, and the number of oppositions which they
provoked, became so apparent that it was not in human nature for
politicians at such a crisis to forgo the opportunity. Most of the
Liberal party would have preferred to drop the Bill temporarily and
refer it to a Committee of Enquiry. Mr. Lloyd George was convinced that
this would be fatal to his measure, concerning which he was possessed by
a missionary zeal. Probably when his career comes under the study of
impartial history it will be perceived that never at any moment was he
so passionately and so honestly in earnest as upon this quest. But it is
certain that by pursuit of it he created enormous difficulties in the
way of those reforms which the democratic alliance at large most desired
to achieve. He carried his point; an autumn session followed, in which
the mind of the electorate was diverted from the Irish question and all
other questions except that of Insurance, and Parliament itself was
jaded to the brink of exhaustion.

The matter was difficult for us in Ireland because, owing to the
different system of Public Health Administration, many of the most
important provisions could not apply, and because the Bill as a whole
was framed to meet the needs of a highly industrialized and crowded
community. Broadly speaking, it was less desired in Ireland than in
Great Britain; and even for Great Britain Mr. Lloyd George was
legislating in advance of public opinion rather than in response to it.
Mr. O'Brien and his following vehemently opposed the application of the
Bill to Ireland; and the Irish Catholic Bishops, by a special
resolution, expressed their view to the same effect. The Bill, however,
had a powerful advocate in Mr. Devlin, and the Irish party decided to
support its extension to Ireland, subject to certain modifications which
they obtained.

Apart from the new unsettlement of public opinion which it created both
in Great Britain and in Ireland, the Insurance Act added to our
difficulties on the Home Rule question. It was clear already that the
question of finance lay like a rock ahead. Up to 1908 the proceeds of
Irish revenue had always given a margin over the cost of all Irish
services, though that margin had dwindled almost to vanishing-point. Old
Age Pensions completely turned the beam and left us in the position of
costing more than we contributed. Now the outlay on Insurance added half
a million a year to the balance against us.

Still, difficulties and perplexities were not limited to one side. The
Tory party were much divided since the crisis on the Parliament Act. A
section, and the most active section, had been violently opposed to the
surrender on the critical division, and these men were profoundly
discontented with Mr. Balfour's leadership; so Mr. Balfour, yielding to
intimations, suddenly resigned. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Bonar Law was
chosen to succeed him, Mr. Long and Mr. Chamberlain waiving their
respective claims.

This choice was of sinister augury. Mr. Law did not know Ireland. But,
Canadian-born, he came from a country in which the Irish factions and
theological enmities had always had their counterpart; his father, a
Presbyterian Minister, came of Ulster stock. All the blood in him
instinctively responded to the tap of the Orange drum. As far back as
January 27, 1911, he had urged armed resistance to Home Rule.

This was a line which Mr. Balfour did not see his way to take, and
probably here rather than elsewhere lay the reason for the choice of Mr.
Bonar Law. The most active section of the Tory party--probably a
minority, for in such cases minorities decide--regarded the passing of
the Parliament Act as an outrage on the Constitution, which should be
resisted by any means, constitutional or unconstitutional. But no
possibility existed of mobilizing a force in Great Britain to fight for
the veto of the House of Lords, nor again did the resistance to a new
Franchise Act, or even to Welsh Disestablishment, promise to be
desperate. In one part only of these islands was there material for a
form of struggle in which the ballot-box and the division lobby might be
supplemented, if not replaced, by quite other methods of political war.
The Tory party saw in Ulster their best fighting chance. There was no
use in telling them that they jeopardized the British Constitution; from
their point of view the British Constitution--as they had known it--was
already gone; it was destroyed in principle and must be either restored
or refashioned according to their mind.

This temper, with the attitude towards parliamentary tradition which it
produced, rendered the political history of the next two and a half
years unlike any other in the history of these countries. The main
purpose of this book is to record and illustrate Redmond's action during
the period which began with the opening of the Great War. But since that
action was conditioned by the circumstances preceding the war--since in
two notable ways it aimed at a solution of the fierce political struggle
which the war interrupted--the political history connected with the
passage of the Home Rule Bill through Parliament must be outlined in
detail, with avoidance, so far as may be, of a controversial tone.


V

It is however necessary, before closing this preliminary review, to take
some account of Redmond's relation to his party, and, in general, of the
working of the parliamentary machine. Difficulties were imposed on him
and on the party from 1910 onwards by our very success.

Electoral chances had placed us apparently in the position of maximum
power. From January 1910 onwards we had a Government committed to Home
Rule, yet so far dependent on us that we could put it out at any moment.
Yet this was by no means an ideal state of affairs. The Government's
weakness was our weakness, and they were liable to the reproach that
they never proposed a Home Rule measure except when they could not
dispense with the Irish vote. Still, from this embarrassing position we
achieved an extraordinary result. Right across our path was the obstacle
of the House of Lords. It was not an impassable barrier for measures in
which the British working classes were keenly interested--for it let the
Trades Disputes Bill go through; but it was wholly regardless of Irish
and of Welsh popular opinion. Under Redmond's leadership we smashed the
House of Lords. The English middle class instinct for compromise was
asserting itself, when he took hold and gave direction to the great mass
of popular indignation which the hereditary chamber had roused against
itself.

Yet guiding action in an alliance of which he was not the head was
delicate work. A clumsy speaker in debate might do infinite mischief.
When a party is in opposition, all its members can talk, and are
encouraged to talk, to the utmost; little harm can be done to one's own
side by what is said in criticism of measures proposed. Support and
exposition is a much more ticklish business. Add to this the fact that
under the fully developed system of parliamentary obstruction--that is,
of using discussion to prevent legislation from being put through--the
best service that a member can render to Government is to say nothing,
but vote.

The tactics of limiting discussion to chosen speakers in important
debates and of discouraging sharply any intervention which might help to
delay a division were pushed further in the Irish party than elsewhere.
We were there under different conditions from the rest; our objective
was as clearly defined as in a military operation: and we all understood
the position. We recognized also that negotiation must be a matter for
Redmond and his inner cabinet of three, and that many things could not
be usefully discussed in a body of seventy men. But the net result was
that the bulk of the party lost interest in their work, and, which was
worse, that Ireland lost interest in the bulk of the party. It followed,
not unnaturally, that the constituencies held one voting machine to be
as good as another, and they did not generally send any men who could
have been of service in debate. They did not any longer see their
members heading a fiery campaign against rents, or flamboyant in attack
on the Government; they heard very little of them at all. They knew
little and cared less about the work of education in British
constituencies, which had to be carried on through the mouths of Irish
members.

Redmond has often been blamed, but quite unjustly, for failure to
attract men of talent into his ranks. Parnell had that power. He had,
and used, the right of suggesting names. But under the constitution of
the United Irish League (originally the work of Mr. William O'Brien when
reunion was accomplished in 1900) the machinery of local conventions was
set up and no interference with their choice was permitted to the
central directorate--which could only insist that a man properly
selected must take the party pledge. Whether this machinery was
inevitable or no, cannot be argued here; but Redmond himself complained
repeatedly in public that it worked badly. Candidates were often chosen
purely for local and even personal considerations, and seldom with any
real thought of finding the man best fitted to do Ireland's work at
Westminster.

This evil, for it was an evil, resulted from the political stagnation in
a country where one dominant permanent issue overshadowed all others.
There being no Unionist candidature possible in the majority of
constituencies, any contest was deprecated--and from some points of view
rightly--as leading to possible faction between Nationalists. The choice
of a member really fell into too few hands; the electorate as a whole
was not sufficiently interested. Nevertheless, several able men came
into our ranks, and under the conditions it was not possible to utilize
their talents fully, as they would have been utilized had we been in
opposition, not in support of the Government. More could have been done,
however, to give them their opportunity, and the responsibility for not
varying the list of speakers rests on Redmond. It was his policy to
avoid personal intervention, and to leave such choices to be settled by
proposals from the party itself. This was a real limitation to his
excellence as leader--for leader he was.

There was, however, an even more important limitation arising out of his
personal temperament. As chairman, I never expect to see his equal. He
had the most perfect public manners of any man I have known, whether in
dealing with some vast assembly or small confidential gathering. The
latter type of meeting is the more difficult to handle, and nothing
could exceed his gift for presiding over and guiding debate. He could
set out a political situation to his party with extraordinary force and
lucidity. He could also, when he chose, so present an issue as to
suggest almost irresistibly the conclusion which he desired--and this
was how he led. Where he came short in the quality of leadership was in
the personal contact.

His relations with all his followers in the party were courteous and
cordial; yet without the least appearance of aloofness he was always
aloof. He did not invite discussion. It needed some courage to go to him
with a question in policy, and if you went, the answer would be simply a
"Yes" or "No." He lacked what Lord Morley attributed to Gladstone, "the
priceless gift of throwing his mind into common stock." No one thought
more constantly, or further ahead; but he could not, rather than would
not, impart his mind by bringing it into contact with others. Men like
being taken into their leader's confidence, and he knew this and, I have
reason to believe, knew the disability which his temperament laid upon
him. Yet he never made an effort to combat it, partly I think from
pride, for he hated everything that savoured of earwigging; he was not
going to put constraint upon himself that his following might be more
enthusiastic. There was no make-believe about him, and he was never one
who liked discussion for discussion's sake.

Profoundly conservative, he had no welcome for novel points of view. I
cannot put it more strongly than by saying that he was more apparently
aware of the qualities which made T.M. Kettle difficult to handle in his
team than of those which made that brilliant personality an ornament and
a force in our party. A more serious aspect of this conservatism was the
separation which it produced between him and the newer Ireland. He
welcomed the Gaelic League and disliked Sinn Fein, but undervalued both
as forces: he was never really in touch with either of them. Ideally
speaking, he ought to have seen to it that his party, which represented
mainly the standpoint of Parnell's day, was kept in sympathy with the
new Young Ireland.

But from the point of view of those who shared his outlook--and they
were the vast majority, in Ireland and in the party--Redmond's essential
limitation, as a leader, was that he lacked the magnetic qualities
which produce idolatry and blind allegiance. What his followers gave him
was admiration, liking and profound respect. No less than this was
strictly due to his high standard of honour, his scorn of all personal
pettiness, his control of temper. In twelve years I heard many
complaints of the manner in which things were managed in the party: I
scarcely ever remember to have heard anyone complain of him. He was
always spoken of as "The Chairman"; no one attributed to him sole
responsibility; and he was the last on whom any man desired to lay a
fault.

Yet when it came, as it often did, to a question of weighing advices one
against the other, there was no mistake how men's opinions inclined. He
had taught his party by experience to have almost implicit confidence in
his judgment; and by this earned confidence he led and he ruled.



CHAPTER III

THE HOME RULE BILL OF 1912


The year 1912, in which the straight fight on Home Rule was to begin,
opened stormily. Mr. Churchill was announced to speak under the auspices
of the Ulster Liberal Association in the Ulster Hall at Belfast. It was
the hall in which his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had used the
famous phrase "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right." Belfast was
determined that the son should not unsay what the father had said in
this consecrated building; it would be, as an Ulster member put it in
the House of Commons, "a profanation." On this first round, Ulster won;
Mr. Churchill spoke at Belfast, but not in the Ulster Hall. There were
angry demonstrations against him; his person had to be strongly
protected and he went away from the meeting by back streets. It was
noticeable that no such precautions were needed for Redmond, who
attended the meeting and walked quite unmolested through the crowd. The
British electorate, as a whole, was somewhat scandalized by the
exhibition of so violent a temper; but the education of the British
electorate was only beginning.

Congestion of business from the previous session deferred the
introduction of the Home Rule Bill till April. Great demonstrations for
and against it were held in advance. In Dublin on March 31st was such a
gathering as scarcely any man remembered. O'Connell Street is rather a
boulevard than a thoroughfare; it is as wide as Whitehall and its length
is about the same. On that day, from the Parnell monument at the north
end to the O'Connell monument at the south, you could have walked on the
shoulders of the people. Four separate platforms were erected, and
Redmond spoke from that nearest to the statue of his old chief. He dwelt
on the universality of the demonstration; nine out of eleven
corporations were represented officially by their civic officers;
professional men, business men, were all fully to the fore. But one
section of his countrymen were conspicuously absent. To Ulster he had
this to say:

"We have not one word of reproach or one word of bitter feeling. We have
one feeling only in our hearts, and that is an earnest longing for the
arrival of the day of reconciliation."

A feature of that gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange
significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then
headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said may be
thus roughly rendered:

"There are as many men here as would destroy the British Empire if they
were united and did their utmost. We have no wish to destroy the
British, we only want our freedom. We differ among ourselves on small
points, but we agree that we want freedom, in some shape or other. There
are two sections of us--one that would be content to remain under the
British Government in our own land, another that never paid, and never
will pay, homage to the King of England. I am of the latter, and
everyone knows it. But I should think myself a traitor to my country if
I did not answer the summons to this gathering, for it is clear to me
that the Bill which we support to-day will be for the good of Ireland
and that we shall be stronger with it than without it. I am not
accepting the Bill in advance. We may have to refuse it. We are here
only to say that the voice of Ireland must be listened to henceforward.
Let us unite and win a good Act from the British; I think it can be
done. But if we are tricked this time, there is a party in Ireland, and
I am one of them, that will advise the Gael to have no counsel or
dealings with the Gall [the foreigner] for ever again, but to answer
them henceforward with the strong hand and the sword's edge. Let the
Gall understand that if we are cheated once more there will be red war
in Ireland."

The platform where Pearse spoke was set up within a stone's throw of the
General Post Office in which, four years later, he was to give effect to
the words he spoke then and to earn his own death in undoing the work of
Redmond's lifetime. At that moment no one heeded his utterance, nor the
speech, also in Irish, of Professor John MacNeill from another platform,
which went, as its speaker was destined to go, half the way with Pearse.

But Redmond never attempted to conceal the existence of this element in
Ireland. Speaking on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill on April
11th, he dealt at the very opening with the charge that the Irish people
wanted separation and that the Irish leaders were separatists in
disguise:

"I will be perfectly frank on this matter. There always has been, and
there is to-day, a certain section of Irishmen who would like to see
separation from this country. They are a small, a very small section.
They were once a very large section. They are a very small section, but
the men who hold, these views at this moment only desire separation as
an alternative to the present system, and if you change the present
system and give into the hands of Irishmen the management of purely
Irish affairs, even that small feeling in favour of separation will
disappear; and if it survives at all, I would like to know how under
those circumstances it could be stronger or more powerful for mischief
than at the present moment."

Sincerer words were never spoken, nor, I think, a better justified
forecast. Where Redmond and all of us were wrong was that we
underestimated the possibility of accomplishing what Pearse ultimately
accomplished, even when assisted by the widespread disillusionment and
sense of betrayal which was the atmosphere of 1916.

But no one in Ireland in 1912 thought of a separatist rebellion. What
was on all tongues was the possibility of physical resistance to Home
Rule. The debate on the first reading went by with little reference to
this contingency, but Mr. Bonar Law closed his speech on that note. He
had attended the great counter-demonstration in Belfast which followed
ours in Dublin and had seen in it "the expression of the soul of a
people."

"These people look upon their being subject to an executive Government
taken out of the Parliament in Dublin with as much horror, I believe
with more horror, than the people of Poland ever regarded their being
put under subjection by Russia; they say they will not submit except by
force to such government. These people in Ulster are under no illusion.
They know they cannot fight the British Army. But these men are ready,
in what they believe to be the cause of justice and liberty, to lay down
their lives."

Bloodshed, if bloodshed there was to be, was anticipated in Ulster only,
and the resistance indicated at this point was purely passive. But even
after the Bill had been introduced, Tories entertained the hope that a
Nationalist Convention might save them trouble and reject what the
Government offered. Even Mr. O'Brien, however, had given the Bill a
lukewarm approval, and at this moment Redmond's prestige stood very
high. When the Convention assembled, he utilized that advantage to the
full. These assemblies presented a problem which might intimidate the
most capable chairman. Theoretically deliberative, they had at least a
representative character; all branches of the United Irish League, all
branches of the Hibernians and Foresters, all county and district
councils sent up their chosen men, to whom were added such clergy as
chose to attend. The result was a mass of over two thousand persons
packed into a single room; they deliberated in the physical conditions
of a crowd; hearing was difficult, disorder only too easily brought
about. I have seen one of these Conventions sharply divided in opinion,
and counting of votes would have been impossible. On this day, however,
there was only one opinion: the business was to manifest support and to
strengthen the leader's hand, Redmond at the outset laid down the
proposition that it was their "duty" as Nationalists to accept what he
described as a far better Bill than Gladstone ever offered. He further
indicated the need for a resolution that the question of supporting,
proposing or rejecting amendments should be left to the Irish party.
This was promptly carried by acclamation. All decisions were unanimous
that day.

But before this or any other resolution was put to the Convention,
Redmond asked the multitude there to give, what they gave most
willingly, a welcome to Mr. Gladstone's grandson, who as a young member
of Parliament had just voted for the Bill. The greeting which he
received showed that Ireland had not forgotten what Gladstone's last
years had been.

In the first of his speeches upon the Bill, Sir Edward Grey, a survivor
from Gladstone's Ministry, said, as he threw a glance back over the
struggle from 1886 to 1893:

"Two things stirred me at the time; they stir me still. One is Mr.
Gladstone's intense grip of the fact that there was a national spirit in
Ireland, and the splendour of the effort he made in his last years to
acknowledge and reconcile that spirit. The other is the Irish response
to Mr. Gladstone. It was not the assent of mere tacticians who had
gained an advocate and a point. It was genuine, warm and living feeling,
a response of gratitude and sympathy the same in kind and as living as
his own."

If Redmond's task from 1912 onwards was not lightened by the existence
of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith's
Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame. There was no intense grip of
any fact in the Government's attitude, and on one cardinal point they
were unstable as water. Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction
of the Bill, had used the words: "What argument is there that you can
raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for
giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east
province?" Redmond, following him, made one of his few false moves in
debate. "Is that the proposal? Is that the demand?" he asked. Sir Edward
Carson shot the question at him: "Will you agree to it?" Seldom does the
House see a practised speaker so much embarrassed; Redmond in confusion
passed to another topic. He was soon to be confronted with that same
line of reasoning, pushed not dialectically by an opponent, but as a
step in parliamentary negotiation from the Treasury Bench. Mr.
Churchill, who introduced the Second Reading, made it apparent that the
demonstration in Belfast had not been wasted on him.

"Whatever Ulster's rights may be," he said, "they cannot stand in the
way of the whole of the rest of Ireland. Half a province cannot impose a
permanent veto on the nation. The utmost they can claim is for
themselves. I ask, do they claim separate treatment for themselves? Do
the counties of Down and Antrim and Londonderry, for instance, ask to be
excepted from the scope of this Bill? Do they ask for a parliament of
their own, or do they wish to remain here? We ought to know."

This was to proceed at once into the region of a bargain. Mr. Gladstone,
with his grip on the existence of a national spirit in Ireland, would
have known that concession on such point was a very different matter
from some alteration in the financial terms or in the composition of the
Parliament. It admitted, in fact, the contention that Ireland was not a
nation but a geographical expression.

As soon as the Bill went into Committee, the result was seen. The first
serious amendment proposed to exclude the four counties, Antrim, Down,
Armagh, and Derry, and it was moved from the Liberal benches. Three
Liberal speakers supported it in the early stages of a debate which
lasted to the third day--and on the division the majority, which had
been 100 for the Second Reading, fell to 69. Mr. Churchill did not
vote--nor, although this was not then so apparently significant, did Mr.
Lloyd George.

Thus from the very first the point of danger revealed itself. By the
mere threat of a resistance which could only be overcome through the use
of troops, Ulster had made the first dint for the insertion of a wedge
into the composite Home Rule alliance, and into the Cabinet itself. All
this had been gained without any tactical sacrifice, without even
anything like a full disclosure of the force which lay behind this line
of attack.

Nor was the full extent of weakness revealed. In such a case, much
depended on the personality of the man who moved the amendment, and Mr.
Agar-Robartes was one of the most whimsically incongruous figures in the
Government ranks. Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and
serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would
have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The
climax of his incongruity was a vehement and rather antiquated
Protestantism; he was, for instance, among the few who opposed the
alteration of the Coronation oath to a formula less offensive to
Catholics. Nobody doubted that his Cornish constituents would endorse
whatever he did, for the House held few more popular human beings, but
no one took him very seriously as a politician. This particular view of
his certainly made no breach between him and his inseparable associate,
Mr. Neil Primrose, who, as time went on, took as strong a line against
Ulster's claims as Agar-Robartes did for them.--_Sunt lacrimae rerum_.
I remember vividly in August 1914 the sudden apparition of this pair,
side by side as always, in their familiar place below the gangway, but
in quite unfamiliar guise, for khaki was still new to the benches. The
two brilliant lads--for they were little more--have gone now, swept into
the abyss of war's wreckage; the controversy which divided them remains,
virulent as ever.

Agar-Robartes stuck to his guns and voted against the Bill henceforward;
the other Liberals who supported him were ultimately brought into the
Government lobby. What had really mattered was Mr. Churchill's speech on
the Second Reading. Captain Pirrie, one of Redmond's few closely
attached friends outside the Irish party, bound, I think, far more in
affection to the Irish leader than to his own chiefs, complained angrily
of the Government's evasive reticence. This brought up the Prime
Minister, whose speech was brief and direct:

"This amendment proceeds on an assumption which I believe is radically
false, namely, that you can split Ireland into parts. You can no more
split Ireland into parts than you can split England or Scotland into
parts."

When Sir Edward Carson had spoken, the Ulster leader's speech enabled
Redmond to point out that Ulstermen refused to accept this proposal as a
means by which Ulster might be reconciled to Home Rule, but were ready
to vote for it simply as a wrecking amendment. General opinion on both
sides of the House agreed that the amendment made the Bill impossible;
and the majority held that therefore Ulster must give way. Ulster, on
the other hand, held that therefore there must be no Home Rule Bill. But
there was a Liberal element evidently not convinced that Home Rule might
not be possible with Ulster excluded. Mr. Birrell admitted that the plan
of segregating a portion had been considered, but had been rejected, on
the merits, as unworkable. Still he professed himself open to
conviction. The argument which Mr. Bonar Law decided to use was a
threat. Government are saying to the people of Ulster, he said,
"Convince us that you are in earnest, show us that you will fight, and
we will yield to you as we have yielded to everybody else." Captain
Craig, following, said that the Prime Minister anticipated that Ulster's
objection would after a few years be merely a ripple on the surface. "If
the right honourable gentleman has challenged this part of his Majesty's
dominions to civil war, we accept the challenge."

This temper soon had ugly expression. On June 29th an excursion party of
the Ancient Order of Hibernians (the Roman Catholic counterpart to the
Orange Order) met with another excursion party of Protestants, mainly
Sunday-school children, at a place called Castledawson. Taunts were
exchanged and one of the Hibernians tried to snatch a flag from the
other procession; so a disturbance began in which some of the children
were hurt and many frightened. This discreditable incident was magnified
with all the rancour of partisanship--as in the state of feeling must
have been expected. But the reprisals were startling. All Catholics were
driven out of the Belfast shipyards; many were injured, and over two
thousand men were still deprived of work on July 12th, when the Unionist
party held a great meeting at Blenheim. Mr. Bonar Law, facing for the
first time a vast typical gathering of his supporters, said that, on a
previous occasion, when speaking as little more than a private member of
Parliament, he had counselled action outside constitutional limits. Now,
he emphasized it that he took the same attitude as leader of the
Unionist party.

"We shall use any means--whatever means seem to us to be most likely to
be effective--any means to deprive them" (the Government) "of the power
they have usurped and to compel them to face the people whom they have
deceived. The Home Rule Bill in spite of us may go through the House of
Commons. There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. I can
imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall
not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by
the overwhelming majority of the British people."

Sir Edward Carson said on behalf of Ulster: "It will be our duty shortly
to take such steps--and, indeed, they are already being taken--as will
perfect our arrangements for making Home Rule absolutely impossible. We
will shortly challenge the Government to interfere with us if they dare.
We will do this regardless of consequences, of all personal loss and
inconvenience. They may tell us, if they like, that this is treason."

Well might Mr. Bonar Law say in returning thanks that this day "would be
a turning-point in their political history."

Moderate opinion was by no means glad to have reached this
turning-point, and _The Times_ rebuked Mr. Law for his violence. But,
tactically, the Unionists were right: they had a Government indisposed
to action and they made the most of their opportunity. Mr. Churchill
again took up the conduct of the controversy, and in the recess
proceeded to outline a policy which he described as federal devolution.
The Prime Minister had said you could no more split Ireland into parts
than England or Scotland. But Mr. Churchill argued that, in the interest
of efficiency, England must be divided into provincial units with
separate assemblies; that Lancashire, for instance, had on many matters
a very different outlook from that of Yorkshire. He did not draw the
conclusion; but it was not difficult to infer that Mr. Churchill was at
least as ready to give separate rights to Ulster as to any group of
English counties, and was equally ready to pitch overboard the Prime
Minister's argument for refusing partition in Ireland.

In the meantime Ulster's preparations continued. It was indicated that
they would bear a religious character, and the Protestant Churches were
deeply involved. The proposal of a Covenant was made public in August,
though the actual signing of it was deferred to "Ulster Day," September
28th. Sir Edward Carson was provided with a guard carrying swords and
wooden rifles, and in one instance dummy cannon made a feature of the
pageant. These things excited a good deal of derision, and the language
of the Covenant was held to be only "hypothetical treason." The main
words were:

"We stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our
cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom and in
using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present
conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland."

The Covenant in that committed the signatories to no breach of the law;
it was only a pledge to refuse to recognize the authority of a
Parliament not yet in being. All Ulster's proceedings might so far be
dismissed, as the Attorney-General, Mr. Rufus Isaacs, dismissed them, as
being "a demonstration admirably stage-managed, and led by one of great
histrionic gifts." The threats of the use of force, said the
Attorney-General, would not turn them aside by a hair's-breadth. Mr.
Asquith, equally vigorous in his speech, was less decisive in his
conclusions. Speaking at Ladybank on October 5th, he denounced "the
reckless rodomontade of Blenheim, which furnishes forth the complete
grammar of anarchy." But he was careful to point out that there was no
demand for separate treatment for Ulster, and that Irish Unionists were
simply refusing to consent to Home Rule under any conditions. He
refrained from saying how a demand for separate treatment of Ulster
would be dealt with if it were made.

When Parliament resumed its sittings, in a temper much heated by all the
challenge and controversy of the recess, Mr. Lloyd George pushed this
line of argument a shade further. He argued that Sir Edward Carson
himself persisted in treating Ireland as a unit.

"Until Ulster departs from that position there is no case. Ulster has a
right to claim a hearing for separate treatment; she has no right to
say, 'Because we do not want Home Rule ourselves the majority of
Irishmen are not to have Home Rule.'"

Yet upon the balance of events, Unionists were probably disappointed. A
very strong British feeling against Sir Edward Carson and his Belfast
following had been generated by the expulsion of Catholics from the
shipyards and in general by the advocacy of civil war. In October 1912
several notable men who had previously counted as Unionists--Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir J. West-Ridgway--all declared
for Home Rule. Exasperation against the incidence of the new Insurance
Act lost the Government votes at every by-election; but the Irish cause
on the whole gained ground, and the chief cause of that advance was the
respect universally felt for Redmond's personality and leadership. On
November 22nd he attended a huge meeting of the National Liberal
Federation at Nottingham along with the Prime Minister and received a
wonderful welcome. The step was novel. Never since Parnell's work began
had the leader of the Irish people stood on the same platform in Great
Britain with the leader of any English party. It was, however, the
return of a compliment, for Mr. Asquith had come to Dublin in the summer
and there spoken along with the Irish leader. Moreover, a recent
incident had shown how necessary it was to maintain the closest
co-operation; a snap division on November 11th had inflicted defeat on
the Government and occasioned loss of perhaps a fortnight's
parliamentary time.

But in the very act of thus strengthening his hold on the British
electorate, Redmond gave ground to those in Ireland who desired to
represent him as a mere tool of the Liberal party, a pawn in Mr.
Asquith's game. Foreseeing this evil did not help to combat it, and on
the whole it was Redmond's inclination to take a sanguine view of his
country's good sense and generosity.

The Committee stage of discussion lasted beyond the end of the year. On
the finance arrangements Redmond had to face fierce opposition from Mr.
O'Brien's party, which was endorsed by the Irish Council of County
Councils. Here difficulties were inevitable, and attack was easy either
for the Unionists, who pressed the argument that Ireland was to be
started on its career of self-government with a subsidy of some two
millions per annum from Great Britain, or for the O'Brienites, who urged
that the country was already overtaxed in proportion to its resources,
that it needed large expenditure for development, and that the possible
budget indicated by the Bill left no serious possibility for reducing
taxes or for undertaking even necessary expenditure. Redmond, on the
other hand, was bound to conciliate the vested interests of civil
servants, officials in all degrees, and the immense police force.
Retrenchment on the vast area of unproductive expenditure which Castle
government had created could only be hoped for at a very distant date.
He could not therefore promise substantial economy; nor could he argue
for a further increase of subsidy without playing into the Tories'
hands. On all this detail of the measure, the attack in debate was bound
to be very powerful.

So far as Great Britain was concerned, the reply of Home Rulers was
tolerably effective. In 1886 it had been feasible to propose Home Rule
with an Imperial contribution of two and a half millions. By 1893 the
possible margin had dropped heavily, and Mr. Gladstone had foretold that
within fifteen years Ireland would absorb more money for purely Irish
services than Irish taxation produced. This prophecy had been fulfilled
to the letter, and everyone saw that to continue the Union meant
increasing this charge automatically. It was better to cut the loss and
at least say that it should not exceed a fixed figure.

But in Ireland men dwelt always on the Report of the Financial Relations
Commission, which had represented the balance as heavily against England
and the account for overtaxation of the poorer country as reaching three
hundred millions. No man quoted this document oftener than Redmond, and
none was a firmer believer in its justification. But he realized, as his
countrymen did not, that such a claim could never hope for cash
settlement, that its value was as an argument for the concession of
freedom upon generous terms. How could he urge that the terms proposed
were ungenerous, when Great Britain offered to pay the cost of all Irish
services--amounting to a million and a half more than Irish revenue--and
to provide over and above this a yearly grant of half a million,
dropping gradually, it is true, but still remaining at a subsidy of two
hundred thousand a year so long as the finance arrangements of the Bill
lasted?

Nevertheless, these arrangements were bad ones, and this was where the
Bill was most vulnerable on its merits; for self-government without the
control of taxation and expenditure is at best an unhopeful experiment.

But in the public mind at large only one difficulty bulked big, and that
was Ulster. Men on both sides began to be uneasy about the consequences
of what was happening, and this temper reflected itself in the House. On
New Year's Day 1913, at the beginning of the Report stage, Sir Edward
Carson moved the exclusion of the province of Ulster. His speech was in
a new tone of studied conciliation. But, as the Prime Minister
immediately made clear, there was no offer that if this concession were
made opposition would cease. It was merely recommended as the sole
alternative to civil war. Redmond, in following, let fall an _obiter
dictum_ on the position of the Irish controversy:

"No one who observes the current of popular opinion in this country can
doubt for one instant that if this opposition from the north-east corner
of Ulster did not exist, Home Rule would go through to-morrow as an
agreed Bill."

For this reason, he said, he would go almost any length within certain
well-defined limits to meet that section of his fellow-countrymen. His
conditions were, first, that the proposal must be a genuine one, not put
forward as a piece of tactics to wreck the Bill, but frankly as part of
a general settlement of the Home Rule question; secondly, that it must
be of reasonable character; and thirdly, not inconsistent with the
fundamental principle of national self-government. Ulster's present
proposal, if accepted, carried with it no promise of a settlement; it
was unreasonable as proposing to strike out of Ireland five counties
with Nationalist majorities. But finally, on a broader ground, it
destroyed the national right of Ireland.

"Ireland for us is one entity. It is one land. Tyrone and Tyrconnell are
as much a part of Ireland as Munster or Connaught. Some of the most
glorious chapters connected with our national struggle have been
associated with Ulster--aye, and with the Protestants of Ulster--and I
declare here to-day, as a Catholic Irishman, notwithstanding all the
bitterness of the past, that I am as proud of Derry as of Limerick. Our
ideal in this movement is a self-governing Ireland in the future, when
all her sons of all races and creeds within her shores will bring their
tribute, great or small, to the great total of national enterprise,
national statesmanship, and national happiness. Men may deride that
ideal; they may say that it is a futile and unreliable ideal, but they
cannot call it an ignoble one. It is an ideal that we, at any rate, will
cling to, and because we cling to it, and because it is there, embedded
in our hearts and natures, it is an absolute bar to such a proposal as
this amendment makes, a proposal which would create for all times a
sharp, eternal dividing line between Irish Catholics and Irish
Protestants, and a measure which would for all time mean the partition
and disintegration of our nation. To that we as Irish Nationalists can
never submit."

Later in the debate, Mr. Bonar Law admitted quite frankly the argument
against treating all Ulster as Unionist, and he proceeded to suggest
that any county in Ulster might be given power to decide whether or not
it should come into the new Parliament. It was plain, however, and Mr.
Churchill made it plainer, that the Unionist leader did not speak for
Ulster; Ulster's intention was still to use its own opposition to Home
Rule as a bar to self-government for the whole of Ireland.

Equally was it plain that the plebiscite by counties would not be
unacceptable to Mr. Churchill.

The proposal for the exclusion of the entire province was defeated by a
majority of 97 and the Third Reading was carried by 110. A few days
later the city of Derry returned a Home Ruler, and the Ulster
representation became seventeen for the Bill and sixteen against. This
dramatic change produced a considerable effect on British opinion.
Redmond, speaking at a luncheon given to the winner, Mr. Hogg, indicated
the lines on which he was disposed to bargain. He would be willing to
give Ulster more than its proportional share of representation in the
Irish Parliament.

The debate in the House of Lords was marked by certain speeches which
showed that public opinion had moved considerably. Lord Dunraven
declared for the Second Reading, though pressing all the line of
objection to the Bill which had been taken by Mr. O'Brien and his party.
He heaped scorn also as an Irishman upon "this absurd theory of two
nations which is only invented to make discord where accord would
naturally be." Lord MacDonnell, whose administrative experience could
no more be questioned than his genius for administration, held that
though amendment was needed the framework of the Bill was good, and that
urgent necessity existed for the change to self-government. He alluded
to the opinion expressed by Mr. Balfour in 1905, that the proper way of
reforming Dublin Castle was by increasing the power of the Chief
Secretary and his Under-Secretary, and thereby getting a stronger grip
on the various departments of the "complicated system" prevailing. "I
thought so too," said Lord MacDonnell, who in 1905 as Under-Secretary
had tried his hand at this reform. "It was one of the illusions that I
took with me to Ireland twenty years ago--but I am now a wiser man....
My observation of the Boards had convinced me before I left Ireland that
no scheme of administrative reform which depends on bureaucratic
organization for its success, or which has not behind it a popular
backing, has the least chance of success in an attempt to establish in
Ireland a government that is satisfactory to the Imperial Parliament or
acceptable to the Irish people."--This was a repudiation of the Irish
Council Bill of 1907 by its main author.

Lord Grey, a vivid and attractive personality, declared strongly for
"such a measure of Home Rule as will give the Irish people power to
manage their own domestic affairs." It was a conviction that had been
forced upon him by his experience of Greater Britain. "Practically every
American, every Canadian, every Australian is a Home Ruler." But the
settlement must proceed upon federal lines; his ideal for Ireland was
the provincial status of Ontario or Quebec, linked federally to a
central parliament at Westminster.

The most significant speech, however, came from the Archbishop of York.
Disclaiming all party allegiance, Dr. Lang claimed to express "the
opinions of a very large number of fair-minded citizens." He admitted
that there was an Irish problem, which could not be solved by "a policy
however generous of promoting the economic welfare of Ireland." "Some
measure of Home Rule is necessary not only to meet the needs of Ireland
but the needs of the Imperial Parliament." This Bill, however, in his
opinion, was ill-adapted to the latter purpose. It would be a block
rather than a relief to the congestion of business. But these objections
were "abstract and academic" in face of the real governing fact.

"The figure of Ulster, grim, determined, menacing, dominates the
scene.... We may not like it. Frankly, I do not like it. It carries
marks of religious and racial bitterness and suspicion. It uses language
about dis-obedience to the law which must provoke disquiet and dislike
in the minds of all who care for the good government of the country. I
am not competent, because I have not shared in the experience of the
history of the Ulster people, to decide whether or not their fears are
groundless. All these things seem to me to be beside the point. If
Ulster means to do what it says, then the results are certainly such as
no citizen can contemplate without grave concern.... I admit, everyone
must admit, that there are circumstances in which a Government is
entitled and bound to run this kind of risk. At the present time I think
we all feel that there is a call upon Governments to stiffen rather than
to slacken their determination in the presence of threats of
dis-obedience or disorder. I will go further and admit that there is one
condition which would justify in my mind His Majesty's Government in
running the risk of the forcible coercion of Ulster. That condition is
that they should have received from the people of this country an
authority, clear and explicit, to undertake that risk. It is perfectly
true that the Prime Minister gave notice that if his party were returned
to power they would be free to raise again the question of Home Rule,
but there is a great difference between the abstract question of Home
Rule and a concrete Home Rule Bill."

That speech undoubtedly represented the temper prevailing in the class
of balancing electors which is so largo in England. Some of us who read
it at the time recognized how far the long struggle for autonomy had
prevailed, but also how strong were the forces which no argument could
reach. Men like Dr. Lang might be offended, even shocked by the action
of those who claimed to be England's garrison in Ireland; but they would
be very slow to use force against such a section, although quite ready
to justify coercion of the Irish majority. Yet what impressed Redmond
was the advance made, rather than the revelation of what resistance
remained. Ho had been more than thirty years an advocate of Ireland's
cause; and now by the spokesman of the impartial educated mind of
England the justice of that cause was admitted. The argument that a
general election was necessary, or would be efficacious in solving the
problem, was one with which he felt well able to contend. In that speech
the Archbishop of York admitted his impression that in by-elections
there had been "much more of Food Taxes and the Insurance Act than of
Home Rule."

On the other hand, for Ulster such a speech had the plainest possible
moral: Ulster's game was to become more grim, more determined, more
menacing. The Home Rule controversy had now resolved itself into a
question whether Ulster really meant business. Sir Edward Carson set
himself to make that plain beyond yea or nay.

In a speech delivered in Belfast, at the opening of a new drill hall, he
asked and answered the question, "Why are we drilling?" He and his
colleagues did not recognize the Parliament Act, he said; a law passed
under it would be only an act of usurpation, a breach of right. "We seek
nothing but the elementary right implanted in every man: the right, if
you are attacked, to defend yourself."

Ulster was going to stand by its Covenant.

"When we talk of force, we use it, if we are driven to use it, to beat
back those who will dare to barter away those elementary rights of
citizenship which we have inherited.... Go on, be ready, you are our
great army. Under what circumstances you have to come into action, you
must leave with us. There are matters which give us grave consideration
which we cannot and ought not to talk about in public. You must trust us
that we will select the most opportune methods of, if necessary, taking
on ourselves the whole government of the community in which we live. I
know a great deal of that will involve statutory illegality, but it will
also involve much righteousness."

Some of the questions which needed grave consideration were suggested by
happenings that followed hard on this speech. Much ridicule had been
poured on the drillings with dummy muskets. Ulster evidently decided to
push the matter a step further. A consignment of one thousand rifles
with bayonets, in cases marked "electrical fittings," was seized at
Belfast on June 3, 1913. Other incidents of the same nature followed. It
was argued, by those who sought to represent the whole campaign as an
elaborate piece of bluff, that the weapons were useless and that they
were deliberately sent to be seized. A feature which scarcely bore out
this view was that one consignment was addressed to the Lord-Lieutenant
of an Ulster county who was also an officer in the Army. A justice of
the peace, or an officer, to whom a consignment of arms had been sent
for a Nationalist organization would have been ordered to clear himself
in the fullest way of complicity, and even of sympathy, or he would have
forfeited his commission. The noble-man involved, however, made no
explanation, and was probably never officially asked to do so.

It was commonly believed in the House of Commons that at some point, if
not repeatedly, Government consulted the Irish leader or his principal
advisers as to whether measures of repression should be undertaken
against Ulster. No such consultation took place. But the opinion
prevailing among the leading Nationalists was no doubt known or
inferred. Mr. Dillon, speaking on June 16, 1914, when the danger-point
had been clearly reached, justified the previous abstinence from
coercion.

"I have held the view from the beginning that it would not have been
wise policy for a Government engaged in the great work of the political
emancipation of a nation to embark on a career of coercion. I knew, and
knew well, all the difficulties and all the reproaches that the
Government would have to face if they abstained from coercion. It is a
difficult and almost unprecedented course for a Government to take, and
it is, as the Chief Secretary said, a courageous one. But with all its
difficulties and dangers it is the right course. We who have been
through the mill know what the effect of coercion is. We know that you
do not put down Irishmen by coercion. You simply embitter them and
stiffen their backs."

It is therefore unquestionable that the decision to do nothing had
Redmond's approval. Whatever may be thought of that policy, one factor
was assuredly underestimated--the effect produced on the public mind by
the spectacle of highly placed personages defying the law and defying it
with impunity. It was possible to argue that a conviction for
hypothetical treason would be difficult to secure and that failure in a
prosecution would only encourage lawless conduct. But Privy Councillors
who made preparations for prospective rebellion and remained Privy
Councillors were a new phenomenon. The public thought, and it was
apparent that the public would think, that Government was afraid to
quarrel with what is called Society. Society shared that belief and
began to extend its influence in a new direction. No Government can
permit itself to be defied without general relaxation of discipline, and
the effects extended themselves to the Army. At a meeting on July 12th
in Ulster a telegram was read out from "Covenanters" in an Ulster
regiment, urging "No surrender until ammunition is spent and the last
drop of blood." In his speech on that occasion Sir Edward Carson
declared that every day brought him at least half a dozen letters from
British officers asking to be enrolled among the future defenders of
Ulster. One officer, he said, having signed the Covenant, was ordered to
send in his papers and resign his commission. The officer refused to do
so, and after a short time was simply told to resume his duty.

"We have assurance from the Prime Minister," said Sir Edward Carson,
"that the forces of the Crown are not to be used against Ulster.
Government know that they could not rely on the Army to shoot down the
people of Ulster."

Later events in Ireland furnished a grim commentary as to what the Army
would be willing, and would not be willing, to do in the way of shooting
down in Ireland; and such words as these of Sir Edward Carson were
destined to be among the chief difficulties which Redmond had to
encounter when he sought to lead Ireland into the war.

At the meeting of that day, delegates were present from a British League
to assist Ulster in her resistance. Behind this new quasi-military
organization stood now the whole of one great party. Sir Edward Carson
transmitted a message from Mr. Bonar Law in these words:

"Whatever steps we may feel compelled to take, whether they be
constitutional, or in the long run whether they be unconstitutional, we
will have the whole of the Unionist party under his leadership behind
us."

Later in the autumn, on the first anniversary of Ulster Day, there was
formally announced the formation of an Ulster Provisional Government,
with a Military Committee attached to it. A guarantee fund to indemnify
all who might be involved in damaging consequences was set on foot, and
a million sterling was indicated as the necessary amount to be obtained.

In the meantime signs of distress came from the Liberal camp. Mr.
Churchill, in speeches to his constituents, renewed the suggestions for
partition. More notable was a letter from Lord Loreburn, who had till
recently been Lord Chancellor, and who was known as a steady and
outspoken Home Ruler. He appealed in _The Times_ of September 11, 1913,
for a conference between parties on the Irish difficulty. Irish
Nationalist opinion grew profoundly uneasy, and Redmond at Limerick on
October 12th set out his position with weighty emphasis. He referred to
the fact that during the summer he himself, assisted by Mr. Devlin, had
followed Sir Edward Carson and other Ulster speakers from place to place
through Great Britain, and on the same ground had stated the case for
Home Rule. He claimed, and with justice, a triumphant success for this
counter-campaign.

"The argumentative opposition to Home Rule is dead, and all the violent
language, all the extravagant action, all the bombastic threats, are but
indications that the battle is over."

Still, he was too old a politician, he said, not to build a bridge of
gold to convenience his opponents' retreat, provided that the fruits of
victory were not flung away. Mr. Churchill had told the Ulstermen that
there was no demand they could make which would not be matched, and more
than matched, by their countrymen and the Liberal party. On this it was
necessary to be explicit.

"Irish Nationalists can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of
the Irish nation; Ireland is a unit. It is true that within the bosom of
a nation there is room for diversities of the treatment of government
and of administration, but a unit Ireland is and Ireland must
remain.... The two-nation theory is to us an abomination and a
blasphemy."

These were carefully chosen words, and they indicated a possible
acceptance of the proposal that Ulster should have control of its own
administration in regard to local affairs, but that Irish legislation
should be left to a common parliament.

This plan Sir Edward Grey described as his "personal contribution" to a
discussion of possibilities which had been inaugurated by a notable
speech from the Prime Minister. At Ladybank, on October 25th, Mr.
Asquith invited "interchange of views and suggestions, free, frank, and
without prejudice." Nothing, however, could be accepted which did not
conform to three governing considerations. First, there must be
established "a subordinate Irish legislature with an executive
responsible to it"; secondly, "nothing must be done to erect a permanent
and insuperable bar to Irish unity"; and thirdly, though the process of
relieving congestion in the Imperial Parliament could not be fully
accomplished by the present Bill, Ireland must not be made to wait till
a complete scheme of decentralization could be carried out.

The second of these conditions was plainly the most significant. It was
taken to mean that "county option"--the right for each county to decide
whether it would come under a Home Rule Government--would not create "a
permanent and insuperable" obstacle, since each county could be given
the opportunity to vote itself in at any time. Redmond's next important
speech in England showed by its emphasis that he felt a danger. He
denounced "the gigantic game of bluff and black-mail" which was in
progress. The proposed exclusion of Ulster was not a proposition that
could be considered. It would bring about, he thought, the ruin of
Ulster's prosperity. "For us it would mean the nullification of our
hopes and aspirations for the future." It would stereotype an old evil
in the region where it still existed. What Ulster really feared, he
said, was the loss, not of freedom or prosperity, but of Protestant
ascendancy.

This was the truth; Protestant ascendancy, which in his boyhood had
existed throughout all Ireland, was in consequence of the Irish party's
work dead in three provinces. It remained and must remain in Ulster,
where Protestants were a majority, but it would be qualified if that
region came under the control of a parliament elected by all Ireland.
That was and is the true reason of Ulster's resistance to national
self-government. What he would concede and what he would reject, Redmond
indicated in general words: "There is no demand, however extravagant and
unreasonable it may appear to us, that we are not ready carefully to
consider, so long as it is consistent with the principle for which
generations of our race have battled, the principle of a settlement
based on the national self-government of Ireland. I shut no door to a
settlement by consent, but ... we will not be intimidated or bullied
into a betrayal' of our trust."

It was noted at that time that he had said nothing to rule out Sir
Edward Grey's proposal, which would have left the local majority
predominant in Ulster's own affairs; and on December 4th Sir Edward Grey
spoke again, showing a firmness that was the more impressive because of
his habitual moderation of tone. One thing, he said, was worse than
carrying Home Rule by force, and that would be the abandonment of Home
Rule. Two suggestions had been made--a proposal for the temporary
exclusion of Ulster and a plan for giving to Ulster administrative
autonomy. Neither had been received by Ulster "in a spirit which seemed
likely to lead to a settlement.... Was it a settlement by consent they
wanted, or was their aim simply the destruction of the Bill?"

This emphasized what Redmond had said a few days earlier at Birmingham,
when he declared that the fight against Home Rule was not an honest one,
that its real purpose was to defeat the Parliament Act and restore to
the Tory party its special control over the legislative machine.

The facts were plain on the surface. The Tories clamoured for a fresh
general election, urging that the electors never realized that the
Liberal programme involved civil war. But to concede this claim
indirectly defeated the Parliament Act, which would then have broken
down at the first attempt to apply it. What added to the insincerity of
the argument was Ulster's repeated refusal to be influenced by the
result of any election. Under no circumstances, speaker after speaker
from Ulster declared, would they submit to Home Rule. The prospect of
civil war remained, with only one limitation. Mr. Bonar Law undertook
that if a general election took place and the Liberals again came back,
the British Unionist party would not support Ulster in physical
resistance. They would, however, continue to oppose a Home Rule Bill by
all constitutional means.

Nevertheless, the English disposition to compromise was already
operating. Mr. Asquith was the last of mankind to make a quixotic stand
for principle, and the most disposed to pride himself on a practical
recognition of realities. His Government was in rough water. During the
summer Mr. Lloyd George's transaction in Marconi shares had been
magnified by partisan rancour into a crime. Much more serious was the
split with Labour, which led to the loss of seat after seat at
by-elections, when the allied forces which stood behind the Parliament
Act attacked each other and let the Tories in. The Women's Franchise
agitation was also coming to its stormiest point.

Redmond's part was one of extraordinary difficulty. The cause for which
he stood was one affecting the interests of only a small minority of the
total electorate concerned in the struggle which now spread over both
islands. The Irish problem belonged in reality to the Victorian era;
those in the British electorate whom it could stir to enthusiasm were
stirred by a memory, not by a new gospel. Normally, but for the chance
of Parnell's overthrow, it would have been solved in Gladstone's last
years. For most Liberals, for all Labour men, the fact that it had
passed beyond the sphere of argument meant a lack of driving force. It
was a part of accepted Liberal orthodoxy; minds were centred rather on
those social controversies in which Mr. Lloyd George was the dominant
figure, and upon which opinion had not yet crystallized.

Further, the cry of Protestant liberties in danger, the cause of
Protestants who conducted their arming to the accompaniment of hymns and
prayer, made inevitably a searching appeal to the feelings of an island
kingdom where the prejudice against Roman Catholics is more instinctive
than anywhere else in the world. Looking back on it all, I marvel not at
the difficulties we encountered, but at the success with which we
surmounted them; and the great element in that success was Redmond's
personality. His dignity, his noble eloquence, his sincerity, and the
large, tolerant nature of the man, won upon the public imagination. His
tact was unfailing. In all those years, under the most envenomed
scrutiny, he never let slip a word that could be used to our
disadvantage. This is merely a negative statement. It is truer to say
that he never touched the question without raising it to the scope of
great issues. Nothing petty, nothing personal came into his discourse;
he so carried the national claim of Ireland that men saw in it at once
the test and the justification of democracy.

That is why the Irish cause, instead of being a millstone round the neck
of the parliamentary alliance, was in truth a living cohesive force. But
in order to keep it so it must be pleaded, not as a question for Ireland
only but for the democracy of Great Britain and, in a still larger
sense, for the Commonwealth of the British Empire.

Liberal statesmen in their desire to simplify their own task
underestimated altogether the difficulty which their professed
short-cuts to the goal--or rather, their attempted circuits round
obstacles--created inevitably for the Irish leader. They did not realize
that his genuine feeling--based on knowledge--for the British democracy
at home, and still more for its offshoots overseas, was unshared by his
countrymen, still aloof, still suspicious, and daily impressed by the
spectacle of those who most paraded allegiance to British Imperialism
professing a readiness to tear up the Constitution rather than allow
freedom to Ireland. Liberal statesmen did not understand that Redmond
could only justify to Ireland the part which he was taking if he won,
and that he and not they must be the judge of what Ireland would
consider a defeat. In all probability, also, they overrated his power
and that of the party which he led. They did not guess at the potency of
new forces which only in these months began to make themselves felt, and
which in the end, breaking loose from Redmond's control, undid his work.
A new phase in Irish history had begun, of which Sir Edward Carson was
the chief responsible author.



CHAPTER IV

THE RIVAL VOLUNTEER FORCES


The first stir of a new movement in Nationalist Ireland outside the old
political lines came from Labour--from Irish Labour, as yet unorganized
and terribly in need of organization. On August 26, 1913, a strike in
Dublin began under the leadership of Mr. Larkin. It had all the violence
and disorder which is characteristic of economic struggles where Labour
has not yet learned to develop its strength; it opened new cleavages at
this moment when national union was most necessary: it was fought with
the passion of despair by workers whose scale of pay and living was a
disgrace to civilization; and after five months it was not settled but
scotched, leaving dark embers of revolutionary hate scattered through
the capital of Ireland.

One incident showed some of the consequences ready to spring, even in
England itself, from the action taken in Ulster. Mr. Larkin at the end
of October 1913 was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for sedition
and inciting to disturbance. A fierce outcry ran through the Labour
world in Great Britain; by-elections were in progress, and Government
was angrily challenged with having one law for the rich and another for
the poor, one law for Labour and another for the Unionist party. To this
pressure Government yielded, and Mr. Larkin was liberated after a few
days in jail.

But in Ireland more formidable symptoms soon made themselves manifest.
Captain J.R. White, son of Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith,
was a soldier by hereditary instinct and had won the Distinguished
Service Order in South Africa. But some strain in his composition
answered to other calls, and upon Tolstoyan grounds he ceased to be a
soldier, without ceasing to be a natural leader of men. His first public
appearance was at a meeting in London in support of Home Rule addressed
by a number of prominent persons who were not Roman Catholics. But his
interests were plainly not so much Nationalist as broadly humanitarian;
freedom for the individual soul rather than for the nation was his
object: and he suddenly enrolled himself among Mr. Larkin's allies. His
proposal was outlined to a great assembly of the strikers gathered in
front of Liberty Hall: Mr. Larkin set it out. They must no longer be
"content to assemble in hopeless haphazard crowds" but must "agree to
bring themselves under the influences of an ordered and sympathetic
discipline." "Labour in its own defence must begin to train itself to
act with disciplined courage and with organized and concentrated force.
How could they accomplish this? By taking a leaf out of the book of
Carson. If Carson had permission to train his braves of the North to
fight against the aspirations of the Irish people, then it was
legitimate and fair for Labour to organize in the same militant way to
preserve their rights and to ensure that if they were attacked they
would be able to give a very satisfactory account of themselves."

Thus began in a small sectional manner a national movement which led far
indeed. Mr. O'Cathasaigh, from whose _Story of the Irish Citizen Army_ I
quote, attributes the failure of that purely Labour organization chiefly
to the establishment of the Irish Volunteers.

This was a development which Redmond on his part neither willed nor
approved, yet one which in the circumstances was inevitable. Who could
suppose that the formation of combatant forces would remain a monopoly
of any party? There was no mistaking the weight which a hundred thousand
Ulster Volunteers, drilled and regimented, threw into Sir Edward
Carson's advocacy. As early as September 1913, during the parliamentary
recess, Redmond received at least one letter--and possibly he received
many--urging him to raise the standard of a similar force, and pointing
out that if he did not take this course it might be taken by others less
fit to guide it. The letter of which I speak elicited no answer. It was
never his habit to reply to inconvenient communications--a policy which
he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered
itself within six months, if it were let alone. Certainly in this case
it so happened. Long before six months were up, facts had made argument
superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the
constitutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely
from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the
outset. Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for
what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond. Yet, as I
read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil
war. To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to
him the most hateful. It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an
Ireland divided against itself by new and bloody memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his
blood--though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous,
stirred what was deepest in him--by training and conviction he was
essentially a constitutionalist: he realized profoundly how strong were
the forces behind constitutionalism in Great Britain, how impregnable
was the position of British Ministers if they boldly asserted the law
with equality as between man and man. Where he was mistaken was in his
estimate of the Government with which he had to deal, and especially of
Mr. Asquith. Speaking to his constituents early in the New Year of 1914
he said, "The Prime Minister is as firm as a rock, and is, I believe,
the strongest and sanest man who has appeared in British politics in our
time." The verdict of history might have borne out this judgment had Mr.
Asquith never been forced to face extraordinary times. In the event, it
was Mr. Asquith's lack of firmness and failure in strength which drove
Redmond into belated acceptance of a policy modelled on Sir Edward
Carson's.

As early as July 1913 the demonstrations in Ulster led to discussion of
a countermove among young men in Dublin. But there was no public
proposal, until at the end of October Professor MacNeill, Vice-President
of the Gaelic League, published an article in the League's official
organ calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. The first meeting
of a provisional committee followed a few days later. Support was asked
from all sections of Nationalist opinion; but, as a whole, members of
the United Irish League and of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who
constituted the bulk of Redmond's following, refused to act. Still,
about a third of the committee were supporters of the parliamentary
party; they included Professor Kettle, who was from 1906 to 1910 among
its most brilliant members. It was, however, significant that the Lord
Mayor, a prominent official Nationalist, refused the use of the Mansion
House for a meeting at which it was proposed to start the enrolment of
Irish Volunteers. As a result, the venue was changed to the Rotunda, and
so great enthusiasm was shown that the Rink was used for the assembly.
Even that did not suffice for half the gathering. Three overflow
meetings were held, and four thousand men are said to have been enrolled
that evening.

Yet the movement did not spread at once with rapidity. By the end of
December recruits only amounted to ten thousand. For this two causes
were answerable. The first was the honourable refusal of the committee
to allow companies to be enrolled except according to locality. They
would have no sectional companies of Sinn Fein volunteers, of United
Irish League Volunteers, of Hibernian Volunteers. All must mix equally
in the ranks. The second was the fear of most Nationalists that by
joining an organization with which the national leader was not
identified they might weaken his hand. This operated, although the
declared intention of the organization was to strengthen Redmond's
position. At Limerick in January Pearse said: "In the Volunteer movement
we are going to give Mr. Redmond a weapon which will enable him to
enforce the demand for Home Rule."

Briefly, for several months the numbers of the new force did not show
that the whole of Nationalist Ireland was in support of it. Ireland was
waiting for a sign from Redmond, and it did not come. The events which
literally drove Irish constitutional Nationalists into following
Ulster's example had still to occur.

There was, however, a wide extension of the cadres of the organization,
and it was being spread by men some of whom--like Professor
MacNeill--dissented from Redmond's attitude of quiescence, while some
were general opponents of the whole constitutional policy. They covered
the country with committees, recruited, it is true, from all sections of
Nationalist Ireland. But it was inevitable that the element who
distrusted Redmond, and whose distrust he reciprocated, should attain an
influence out of all proportion to its following in the country.

Government's action--and this sentence will run like a refrain through
the rest of this book--contributed largely to strengthen the extremists
and to weaken Redmond's hold on the people. During eleven months the
Ulster Volunteers had been drilling, had been importing arms, and no
step was taken to interfere. Within ten days after the Irish Volunteer
Force began to be enrolled, a proclamation (issued on December 4, 1913)
prohibited the importation of military arms and ammunition into Ireland.
A system of search was instituted. But the Ulstermen were already well
supplied. Redmond was blamed for not forcing the withdrawal of the
proclamation. He controlled the House of Commons, it was said. This was
the line of argument constantly taken by dissentient Nationalists; and
it was true that he could at any moment put the Government out. Critics
did not stop to ask for whose advantage that would be. Government by
issuing this proclamation had effected no good: they had embarrassed
their chief ally, and they had laid the foundation for an imposing
structure of incidents which grew with pernicious rapidity into a
monumental proof that law, even under a Liberal administration, has one
aspect for Protestant Ulster and quite another for the rest of Ireland.

But in England at the beginning of the fateful year 1914 the Irish
Volunteers had not yet become recognized as a factor in the main
political situation. An attitude of mind had been studiously fostered
which found crude expression soon after the House met. One of the
Liberal party was arguing that Ulster had made Home Rule an absolute
necessity, because Nationalists would have "fourfold justification if
they resisted in the way you have taught them to resist the Government
of this country in maintaining the old system." "They have not the
pluck," interjected Captain Craig, the most prominent of the Ulster
members. The present Lord Chancellor, Mr. F.E. Smith, was voluble in
declarations that Nationalists would "neither fight for Home Rule nor
pay for Home Rule." These taunts did not ease Redmond's position,
especially as it became plain that Ulster's threat of violence had
succeeded.

Mr. Asquith, referring to the "conversations" between leaders which had
taken place during the winter, said that since no definite agreement had
been reached the Government had decided to reopen the matter in the
House. This meant, as Redmond pointed out with some asperity, that the
Prime Minister had accepted responsibility for taking the initiative in
making proposals to meet objections whose reasonableness he did not
admit. The Opposition, he thought, should have been left to put forward
some plan.

Yet Redmond's attitude, and the attitude of the House, was considerably
affected by an unusual speech which had been delivered by the Ulster
leader.

Sir Edward Carson, as everyone knows, is not an Ulsterman, and the chief
of many advantages which Ulster gained from his advocacy was that
Ulster's case was never stated to Great Britain as Ulstermen themselves
would have stated it. It is not true to say that Ulstermen by habit
think of Ireland as consisting of two nations, for all Ulstermen
traditionally regard themselves as Irish and so have always described
themselves without qualification. But it is true to say that Ulster
Protestants have regarded Irish Catholics as a separate and inferior
caste of Irishmen. The belief has been ingrained into them that as
Protestants they are morally and intellectually superior to those of the
other religion. Their whole political attitude is determined by this
conviction. They refuse to come under a Dublin Parliament because in it
they would be governed by a majority whom they regard as their
inferiors. It is in their deliberate view natural that Roman Catholics
should submit to be controlled by Protestants, unnatural that
Protestants should submit to be controlled by Roman Catholics.

It does not express the truth to say that Sir Edward Carson was adroit
enough to avoid putting this view of the case to the electors of Great
Britain or to the House of Commons. Temperamentally and instinctively,
he did not share it. He was a Southern Irishman who at the opening of
his life held himself, as not one Ulsterman in a thousand does,
perfectly free to make up his mind for or against the maintenance of the
Union. He reached the conclusion not only that Home Rule would be
disastrous for Ireland, for the United Kingdom, and for the British
Empire, but that it would mean for Irishmen the acceptance of an
inferior status in the Empire. As citizens of the United Kingdom, he
held, they were more honourably situated than they could be as citizens
of an Irish State within the Empire. This was an attitude of mind which
Ulster could endorse, although it did not fully represent Ulster's
conviction: but this was the case which Sir Edward Carson always made on
behalf of Ulster, and he made it as an Irishman whose personal interests
and connections lay in the South of Ireland, not in the North. His
argument was the more persuasive because it was based on a view of
Ireland's true interest--not of Ulster's only; and it was the harder on
that account for Redmond to repel peremptorily. More than this, between
him and Redmond there was an old personal tie. The Irish Bar is a true
centre of intercourse between men of varying political and religious
beliefs, and as junior barristers Edward Carson and John Redmond went
the Munster circuit together.

All this lay behind the appeal which on February 11, 1914, was implied
rather than expressed in the novel phrase and still more unaccustomed
tone of a consummate orator.

"Believe me," Sir Edward Carson said, "whatever way you settle the Irish
question" (and that phrase threw over the cry of "No Home Rule"), "there
are only two ways to deal with Ulster. It is for statesmen to say which
is the best and right one. She is not a part of the community which can
be bought. She will not allow herself to be sold. You must therefore
either coerce her if you go on, or you must in the long run, by showing
that good government can come under the Home Rule Bill, try and win her
over to the case of the rest of Ireland. You probably can coerce
her--though I doubt it. If you do, what will be the disastrous
consequences not only to Ulster, but to this country and the Empire?
Will my fellow-countryman"--and at this emphatic word, which jettisoned
absolutely the theory of two nations, the speaker turned to his left,
where Redmond sat in his accustomed place below the gangway--"will my
fellow-countryman, the leader of the Nationalist Party, have gained
anything? I will agree with him--I do not believe he wants to triumph
any more than I do. But will he have gained anything if he takes over
these people and then applies for what he used to call--at all events
his party used to call--the enemies of the people to come in and coerce
them into obedience? No, sir; one false step taken in relation to Ulster
will, in my opinion, render for ever impossible a solution of the Irish
question. I say this to my Nationalist fellow-countrymen, and, indeed,
also to the Government: you have never tried to win over Ulster. You
have never tried to understand her position. You have never alleged, and
can never allege, that this Bill gives her one atom of advantage."

Then, carried away by the course of his argument, an angry note came
into his voice, and before a minute had passed we were back in the old
atmosphere. He accused us of wanting "not Ulster's affections but her
taxes."

Well might Redmond say when he rose that Sir Edward Carson had been
heard by all of us with very mixed feelings. "I care not about the
assent of Englishmen," he said; "I am fighting this matter out between a
fellow-countryman and myself, and I say that it was an unworthy thing
for him to say that I am animated by these base motives, especially
after he had lectured the House on the undesirability of imputing
motives."

On the personal note Redmond was to the full as effective as his
opponent, and his speech of that day was memorable. It was also very
much more to the taste of the Liberal rank and file than what came from
their own front bench. "We do not by any means take the tragic view of
the probabilities or even the possibilities of what is called civil war
in Ulster," he said; and added that the House of Commons ought, in his
opinion, "to resent as an affront these threats of civil war." Yet in
the end he promised, for the sake of peace, "consideration in the
friendliest spirit" (not very different from acceptance) of any
proposals that the Government might feel called upon to put forward.

It is noteworthy that in this prolonged debate there was no reference to
the new fact of a second volunteer force. But on February 12th a
question was asked about it. On the 17th there was allusion to another
growing element of danger--the discussions among officers of the Army of
a combined refusal to serve against Ulster. All these factors must have
weighed with Redmond and with his chief colleagues in their discussions
with the Government during the next three weeks. "Friendly
consideration" passed into acceptance on March 9th, when Mr. Asquith,
introducing the Home Rule Bill for its passage in the third consecutive
session (as required by the Parliament Act), outlined the proposed
modifications in it. They involved partition. But the exclusion was to
be optional by areas and limited in time.

The proposal to take a vote by counties had, it will be remembered, been
originally suggested by Mr. Bonar Law, and in following the Prime
Minister he could not well repudiate it. The test, however, which he now
put forward was whether or not the proposals satisfied Ulster: and he
fixed upon the time-limit of six years as being wholly unacceptable.
Redmond, on the other hand, while declaring that the Government had gone
to "the extremest limits of concession," said that the proposals had one
merit: they would "elicit beyond doubt or question by a free ballot the
real opinion of the people of Ulster." This indicated his conviction
that if Home Rule really came the majority in Ulster would prefer to
take their chances under it; the proposal of exclusion being merely a
tactical manoeuvre to defeat Home Rule by splitting the Nationalists.

Its efficacy for that purpose was immediately demonstrated. Mr. O'Brien
followed Redmond with a virulent denunciation of "the one concession of
all others which must be hateful and unthinkable from the point of view
of any Nationalist in Ireland." Opposition from Mr. O'Brien and from Mr.
Healy was no new thing. But by acceptance of these proposals the
Nationalist leader made their opposition for the first time really
formidable. Telegrams rained in that March afternoon--above all on Mr.
Devlin, from his supporters in Belfast, who felt themselves betrayed and
shut out from a national triumph which they had been the most zealous to
promote. From this time onward the position of Redmond personally and of
his party as a whole was perceptibly weakened. Especially an alienation
began between him and the Catholic hierarchy. It was impossible that the
clergy should be well disposed towards proposals which, as Mr. Healy put
it, would make Cardinal Logue a foreigner in his own cathedral at
Armagh.

Yet upon the whole the shake to Redmond's power was less than might have
been expected--largely, no doubt, because the offer was repelled. Sir
Edward Carson described it as "sentence of death with stay of execution
for six years." With a great advocate's instinct, he fastened on the
point in the Government's proposal which was least defensible.

In my opinion these modifications of the Bill were never adequately
discussed in the meetings of the Irish party. All was done between the
Government and Redmond's inner cabinet, consisting of Redmond himself,
Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P. O'Connor. The negotiations were most
delicate and difficult, and above all secrecy is hard to maintain when a
body of over seventy men, each keenly concerned for the view of his
constituents, comes to be consulted. Yet I think it a pity that the
party never thrashed this question out. Once the principle of option was
admitted, a great deal had to be considered. Voting must be a referendum
either to the province as a whole, to the constituencies separately, or
to local units of administration. A referendum by constituencies was as
impossible as one by parishes: for instance, Mr. Devlin's West Belfast,
out of the city's four divisions, would certainly have voted to remain
under the Irish Parliament, and an absurd situation would have resulted.
The choice lay between a vote by counties or by the province as a whole.
In the province, three counties out of nine were as predominantly
Nationalist as any part of Leinster. In two others, Tyrone and
Fermanagh, Nationalists were about 55 per cent of the electorate. But
the bulk of the population of Ulster resided in four counties of the
north-east, so that Protestants over the whole province had a majority
of some two hundred thousand. An appeal to the province, therefore,
might involve the exclusion from Home Rule of a very large area which
was thoroughly Nationalist. On the other hand, every scheme of exclusion
had in view the possibility of the excluded area changing its mind on
the question after a short trial. To separate the four overwhelmingly
Protestant counties was to set up a body in which a change of vote would
be much harder to bring about than in the province. As a matter of
statesmanship there was much to be said for closing with the Ulstermen's
original demand that the province should come in or stay out as a whole.
It satisfied Ulster's sentiment and lessened the chances of
crystallizing a Protestant block of excluded territory, which would tend
to become less and less Irish.

The answer to this was that Nationalists would never consent and did
never consent to the possibility of permanent exclusion for any part.
Insistence on the time-limit was from this point of view a matter of
absolute principle. Yet many believed then, and believe now, that if
any part of Ulster were excluded by legislation it would certainly come
in voluntarily after a short period. On the other hand, if any part were
excluded even for a year, it was difficult to believe that it could ever
be brought in except by its own consent. The view, however, to which we
were committed (with the party's general approval), was expressed by
Redmond at the customary St. Patrick's Day Nationalist banquet in
London.

"To agree to the permanent partition of Ireland would be," he said, "an
outrage upon nature and upon history." He quoted a phrase used by Mr.
Austen Chamberlain, who had described it as "the statutory negation of
Ireland's national claim." But, he argued, no such sacrifice of
principle had been made. The demand of Nationalists was for a Parliament
for the whole of Ireland, having power to deal with "every purely Irish
matter." Temporary limitations of this demand had already been accepted.

"We have agreed, as Parnell agreed in the Bill of 1886, and as we all
agreed in the Bill of 1893, that the power of dealing with some of the
most vital of Irish questions should not come within the purview of the
new Parliament for a definite number of years." The control of police,
for instance, was reserved to the Imperial Parliament in all those Bills
for a term of years. But this did not mean that Parnell or we abandoned
Ireland's right to manage her own police. Reservation of the police in
perpetuity would have been impossible to accept. In the same way, said
Redmond, "the automatic ending of any period of exclusion is for us a
fixed and immutable principle."

To maintain this conformity with national sentiment great advantages
were sacrificed. The whole debates of this period turned on the question
of the time-limit. If it had never been raised, opposition would still
have existed, but the fact would have been plain from the outset that
Protestant Ulster claimed to dictate not only where it had the majority,
but where the majority was against it. Redmond probably believed that
the opinion of Nationalists in the North could not be brought to consent
to abandonment of the time-limit. If so, he probably underrated, then as
always, the influence he possessed. It is always easy to persuade
Irishmen that if you are going to do a thing you should do it
"decently." What is more, a real effect could have been produced on much
moderate opinion in Ulster by saying to Ulster: "Stay out if you like,
and come in when you like. When you come in, you will be more than
welcome." But the decision for this course would have needed to be taken
before the proposals were made, since any attempt to enlarge them was
bound to renew and intensify the inevitable storm of Nationalist
dissent. Whatever the proposal, it should have been absolutely the last
word of concession.

If a clear proposal of local option by counties without time-limit had
been put before Parliament and the electorate, I do not think our
position in Ireland would have been worse than it was made by the
proposal of temporary exclusion, and it would have been greatly
strengthened in Parliament and in the United Kingdom. All moderate men,
and many pronounced Unionists, were becoming uneasy under the perpetual
menace of trouble. Events which now followed rapidly turned the
uneasiness into grave anxiety, but did not turn it to the profit of the
Government.

The policy which was adopted in Mr. Asquith's proposal of March 9th was
the policy which Mr. Churchill had pushed from the first introduction of
the Home Rule Bill, even when it was formally disavowed by the Prime
Minister. Contemptuous rejection of it by the Ulstermen when it was
proposed was not calculated to strengthen Mr. Churchill's personal
position, or to soothe his temper, and on March 14th he made a speech at
Bradford which very greatly stirred public feeling. If Ulster really
rejects the offer, said Mr. Churchill, "it can only be because they
prefer shooting to voting and the bullet to the ballot." Should civil
war break out in Ulster, the issue would not be confined to Ireland: the
issue would be whether civil and parliamentary government in these
realms was to be beaten down by the menace of armed force. Bloodshed was
lamentable, but there were worse things. If the law could not prevail,
if the veto of violence was to replace the veto of privilege, then, said
the orator, "let us go forward and put these grave matters to a proof."

When Mr. Churchill next appeared in the House of Commons, a great
outburst of cheering showed what a volume of feeling had found
expression in his speech. Redmond came to the St. Patrick's Day banquet
under the impression of that scene, and he spoke with a confidence which
gives to his words a tragic irony to-day. He cited "the superb speech of
Mr. Churchill" as evidence that "what is our last word is also the last
word of the Government."

"If the Opposition have spoken their last word," he said, "the Bill will
now proceed upon its natural course. It will proceed rapidly and
irresistibly, and in a few short weeks become the law of the land."

The weeks have lengthened into years, and so much has happened in them
that I keep no clear memory of that evening, though I was present. But
it represented the temper of the time, among Home Rulers, and more
particularly among Irish Nationalists, who generally held the opinion
that the military preparations in Ulster were, as Mr. Devlin called
them, "a hollow masquerade."

We saw the other side of the picture on Thursday, March 19th, when a
Vote of Censure was moved. Mr. Bonar Law launched on the House of
Commons a new and sinister suggestion.

"What about the Army? If it is only a question of disorder, the Army I
am sure will obey you, and I am sure that it ought to obey you; but if
it really is a question of civil war, soldiers are citizens like the
rest of us."

Sir Edward rose immediately the Prime Minister had replied to Mr. Bonar
Law, and his speech was furious. "In consequence of the trifling with
this subject by the Prime Ministe

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