with the preliminaries of the meeting at which this deputation was selected, and I can say with all certainty that if we had had only the most moderate display of political wisdom from Mr Dillon and his friends we could have the great mass of the landlords in Ireland agreeing to the full concession of the constitutional demand for Irish liberty.  The Cork meeting was beyond all doubt or question the most remarkable held in Ireland for a century.  It was summoned by a Joint Committee drawn from the Nationalist and landlord ranks.  On its platform were assembled all the men, either on the landlord or the tenant side, who had been the fiercest antagonists in the agrarian wars of the previous twenty-five years—­men who had literally taken their lives in their hands in fighting for their respective causes.  It is but the barest truth to say that the evictors and the evicted—­the leading actors in the most awful of Ireland’s tragedies—­stood for the first time in Irish history side by side to join hands in a noble effort to obliterate the past and to redeem the future.  It was one of the greatest scenes of true emotion and tremendous hope that ever was witnessed in any land or any time.  If its brave and joyous spirit could only have been caught up and passed along, we would have seen long before now that vision glorious which inspired the deeds and sacrifices of Tone and Emmet and the other magnificent line of martyrs for Irish liberty—­we would have witnessed that brotherhood of class and creed which is Ireland’s greatest need, and upon which alone can her eventual happiness and liberty rest.  And, most striking incident of all, here had met, in a blessed forgetfulness of past rancours and of fierce blows given and received, the two most redoubtable champions of the landlords and the tenants—­Lord Barrymore and Mr William O’Brien, the men whose sword blows upon each other’s shields still reverberated in the minds of everyone present.  What a study for a painter, or poet, or philosopher!  The most dauntless defender of landlordism, in a generous impulse of what I believe to be the most genuine patriotism, stood on a platform with Mr William O’Brien, whom he had fought so resolutely in the Plan of Campaign days, to declare in effect that landlordism could no longer be defended and to agree as to the terms on which it could be ended, with advantage to every section of the Irish nation.  It was only magnanimous men—­men of fine fibre and a noble moral courage—­who could stretch their hands across the yawning chasm of the bad and bitter years, with all their evil memories of hates and wounds and scars and defy the yelpings of the malicious minds who were only too glad to lead on the pack, to shout afterwards at Mr O’Brien:  “Barrymore!” when of a truth, of all the achievements of Mr O’Brien’s crowded life of effort and accomplishment there is not one that should bring more balm to his soul or consolation to his war-worn heart than that he should have induced the enemy of other days to pay this highest