not a little to the fact that he was his father’s son, should have been the one who first showed signs of recalcitrancy against Party rule and discipline when he inveighed against the Land Act of 1881 and betook himself abroad for three years during the time when the national movement was locked in bitterest conflict with the Spencer Coercionist regime.  Let it be at once conceded that Parnell’s lieutenants were men whose gifts and talents would have in any circumstances carried them to eminent heights, but it might be said also they lost nothing from their early association with so great a personality and from the fact that he brought them into the gladiatorial arena, where their mental muscles were, so to speak, trained and tested and extended in combat with some of the finest minds of the age.

In the days when the later Irish Party had entered upon its decrepitude some of its leaders sought to maintain a sorry unity by shouting incessantly from the house-tops, as if it were some sacred formula which none but the unholy or those predestined to political damnation dare dispute:  “Majority Rule.”  And a country which they had reduced to the somnambulistic state by the constant reiteration of this phrase unfortunately submitted to their quackery, and have had grave reason to regret it ever since.  Parnell had very little respect for shams—­whether they were sham phrases or sham politicians.  He was a member of Butt’s Home Rule Party but he was not to be intimidated from pursuing the course he had mapped out for himself by any foolish taunts about his “Policy of Exasperation”; he was a flagrant sinner against the principle of “majority rule,” but time has proved him to be a sinner who was very much in the right.  Mr Dillon used to hurl another name of anathema at our heads—­the heads of those of us who were associated with Mr O’Brien in his policy of national reconciliation—­he used to dub us “Factionists.”  It was not fair fighting, nor honest warfare, nor decent politics.  It was the base weapon of a man who had no arguments of reason by which he could overwhelm an opponent, but who snatched a bludgeon from an armoury of certain evil associations which he knew would prevail where more legitimate methods could not.

I entered the Party in May 1901, having defeated their official candidate at a United Irish League Convention for the selection of a Parliamentary candidate for Mid-Cork on the death of Dr Tanner.  In those days I was not much of a politician.  My heart was with the neglected labourer and I stood, accordingly, as a Labour candidate, my programme being the social elevation of the masses, particularly in the vital matters of housing, employment and wages.  I was not even a member of the United Irish League, being wholly concerned in building up the Irish Land and Labour Association, which was mainly an organisation for the benefit, protection and the education in social and citizen duty of the rural workers.  Mr Joseph