and the resignation of Mr John O’Donnell from the secretaryship of the United Irish League—­under circumstances which Mr Devlin’s admirers will scarcely care to recall—­which gave him his chance.) Mr Dillon was a more or less negligible figure until Mr O’Brien made way for him by his retirement.  Right up to this there was only one man for the Party and the country, and that man was William O’Brien.  Let me say at once that in those days I had no attachments and no personal predilections.  John Redmond, William O’Brien and John Dillon were all, as we say in Ireland, “one and the same to me.”  If anything, because of my Parnellite proclivities, I rather leaned to Mr Redmond’s side, and his chairmanship of the Party had certainly my most loyal adherence.  Otherwise I was positively indifferent to personalities, and to a great extent also to policies, since I was in the Party for one purpose, and one alone, of pushing the labourers’ claims upon the notice of the leaders and of ventilating their grievances in the House of Commons whenever occasion offered.  Furthermore, I do not think I ever spoke to Mr O’Brien until after the Cork election in 1904, when, convinced of the rectitude of his policy and principles, I stood upon his platform to give such humble support as I could to the cause he advocated, and thereafter, I am proud to say, never once turned aside, either in thought or action, from the thorny and difficult path I had chosen to travel.  I take no credit to myself for having taken my stand on behalf of Mr O’Brien’s policy.  I knew him in all essential things, both then and thereafter, to be absolutely in the right.  I was aware that, had he so minded, in 1903, when he was easily the most powerful man in the Party and the most popular in Ireland, he could have smashed at one onslaught the conspiracy of “the determined campaigners” and driven its authors to a well-deserved doom.  But the mistake he made then, as mistake I believe it to be, was that he left the field to those men, who had no alternative policy of their own to offer to the country, and who, instead of consolidating the national organisation for the assertion of Irish right, consolidated it rather in the interests of their own power and personal position.  Thus it happened that a movement conceived and intended as the adequate expression of the people’s will became, in the course of a short twelve months, everywhere outside of Munster, a mere machine for registering the decrees of Mr Dillon and his co-conspirators.

I do not think, if Mr T.M.  Healy had been a member of the Party then, that Mr Dillon would have been able so successfully to entrench himself in power as he did.  Mr Healy knew Mr Dillon inside out and he had little respect for his qualities.  He knew him to be vain, intractable, small-minded and abnormally ambitious of power.  Parnell once said of him:  “Dillon is as vain as a peacock and as jealous as a schoolgirl.”  And when he was not included as a member of the Land Conference