and prayed that he might have the power to stop it.  Mr Redmond I regard in all this wretched business as the unwilling victim of the forces which held him, as a vice in their power.  Yet from the sin of a weak compliancy in the unwise decrees of others he cannot be justly acquitted.  Although the Party had rejected the proposal for a new Land Conference, and thereby broken the articles of reunion under which Mr O’Brien and his friends re-entered it, we continued to remain within its fold.  We could not, for one thing, believe that the country was so steeped in ignorance and blindness that if the facts were once allowed to reach it, or the arguments to be temperately addressed to any free assembly of Irishmen, they would not see where national interests lay.  Accordingly Mr O’Brien and his friends determined to submit, in constitutional fashion, the overwhelming objections to Mr Birrell’s Bill to the judgment of the National Convention which was to consider whether the Bill would expedite or destroy land purchase.  It was conveyed to Mr O’Brien beforehand that it was madness on his part to attempt to get a hearing at the Convention, that this was the last thing “the powers that be” would allow, and that as he valued his own safety it would be better for him to remain away.

Just as he had never submitted to intimidation when it was backed by the whole force of the British Government, Mr O’Brien was equally resolved that the arrogance of the new masters of the Irish democracy was not going to compel him to a mood of easy yielding and he properly decided to submit his arguments to a Convention which, though he was well aware it would be “packed” against him, yet he had hopes might be swayed by the invincibility of his arguments.  In the ordinary course the stewards for managing and regulating the Convention would be drawn from Dublin Nationalists.  On this occasion, however, they came by special train from Belfast and were marched in military order to the Mansion House, where some sackfuls of policemen’s brand-new batons were distributed amongst them.  They were the “Special Constables” of the Molly Maguires recruited for the first time by an Irish organisation to kill the right of free speech for which Irishmen had been contending with their lives through the generations.  It would be quite a comedy of Irish topsy-turvydom were it not, in fact, such a disastrous tragedy.

The favourite cry of the enemies of Conciliation was that the Purchase Act would bankrupt the Irish ratepayers.  By means which it is not necessary to develop or inquire into, the British Treasury was induced on the very eve of the Convention to present to a number of the Irish County Councils claims for thousands of pounds on foot of expenses for the flotation of land loans.  A base political trick of this kind is too contemptible for words.  It, however, gave Mr Redmond one of the main arguments for impressing the Convention that the Birrell Bill could alone save the ratepayers from