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.