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.