also throw open to the free air of a new national spirit those caverns and tabernacles of faction in which good men of all political persuasions had been suffocating for the previous eight years.”  Accordingly the United Irish League was born into the world at Westport on the 16th January 1898, to achieve results which, if they be not greater—­though great, indeed, they are—­the fault assuredly rests not with the founder of the League, but with those others who malevolently thwarted his purposes.  The occasion was opportune.  The three several movements of the Dillonites, Redmondites and Healyites were in ruins, and Ireland went its way unheeding of them.  The young men were busy with their ’98 and Wolfe Tone Clubs.  They drank deep of the doctrines of a heroic age.  Centenary celebrations were held throughout the country, at which men were exhorted to study the history of an era when men were proud to die for the land they loved.  For a space we listened to the martial music of other days, and our hearts throbbed to its stirring notes.  The soul of the nation was uplifted above the squalid rivalries of the “’ites” and the “’isms.”  It awaited a unifying influence and a programme which would disregard the factions and leave a wide-open door for all Nationalists to come in, no matter what sides they had previously taken or whether they had taken any at all.

This wide-open door and this broad-based programme the United Irish League offered.  Mr Dillon attended the inaugural meeting, but from what Mr O’Brien tells us he did not seem to grasp the full potentialities of the occasion, “and he made his own speech without any indication that any unusual results were expected to follow.”  Mr Timothy Harrington, one of the leading and most levelheaded of the Parnellite members, also attended, in defiance of bitter attack from his own side, showing a moral courage sadly lacking in our public men, either then or later.  By what I cannot help thinking was a most fortuitous circumstance for the League, at a moment when its existence was not known outside three or four parishes, Mr Gerald Balfour determined to swoop down upon it and to crush it with the whole might of the Crown forces.  Two Resident Magistrates and the Assistant Inspector-General of Constabulary, with a small army corps of special police, were sent to Westport.  Result—­the inevitable conflict between the police and people took place, prosecutions followed, extra police taxes were put on and a store of popular resentment was aroused, the League getting an advertisement which was worth scores of organisers and monster meetings.  I am myself satisfied that it was the ferocity of the Crown attack upon the League which gave it its surest passport to popular favour.  Whilst the United Irish League was struggling into life in the west I was engaged in the south in an attempt to lead the labourers out of the bondage and misery that encompassed them—­their own sad legacy of generations of servitude and subjection—­but I am nevertheless pleased to recall now that, as the editor of a not unimportant provincial newspaper in Cork, I followed the early struggles of the new League with sympathy and gave it cordial welcome when it travelled our way.