The sacrifice to be made was made at Mr. Dillon’s expense, and he did not acquiesce willingly or cordially.  The cordiality which ultimately marked his relations with Redmond was of later growth—­fostered by the necessity which Mr. Dillon found imposed on him of defending loyally the party’s leader against attacks from the men who had been most active in selecting him.

A part of the compact under which Redmond was elected to the chair limited the power of the newly chosen.  He was to be Chairman, not leader; that is to say, he was not to act except after consultation with the party as a whole:  he was not to commit them upon policy.  This meant in practice that he acted as head of a cabinet, which from 1906 onwards consisted of Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P.  O’Connor—­the last representing not only a great personal parliamentary experience and ability, but also the powerful and zealous organization of Irish in Great Britain.  Redmond adhered scrupulously to the spirit of this compact.  There was only one instance in which he took action without consultation.  But that instance was the most important of all—­his speech at the outbreak of the war.

Another thing which governed his conduct in the chair of the party, as indeed it governed that of nearly all the rank and file, was his horror of the years which Ireland had gone through since Parnell’s fall.  He loathed faction and he had struggled through murky whirlpools of it; for the rest of his life he was determined, almost at any cost, to maintain the greatest possible degree of unity among Irish Nationalists.  Yet in the end he unhesitatingly made a choice and took an action which risked dividing, and in the last event actually divided, Nationalist Ireland as it had never been divided before.  There were things for which he would face even that supreme peril.  Deep in his heart there was a vision which compelled him.  It was the vision of Ireland united as a whole.

All this, however, lay far in the future when he was elected to the chair; for the moment his task was to reunite Irish Nationalists, and it began prosperously.  From the first his position was one of growing strength.  Irishmen all the world over were heartsick of faction and rejoiced in even the name of unity.  Redmond made it a reality.  While leading the little Parnellite party, reduced at last to nine, his line of action was comparable to that pursued by Mr. William O’Brien from 1910 onwards.  It had, to put things mildly, not been calculated to assist the leader of the main Nationalist body.  In 1904, Justin McCarthy, then retired from politics, wrote in his book on British Political Parties:  “Parnell’s chief lieutenant had shown in the service of his chief an energy and passion which few of us expected of him, and was utterly unsparing in his denunciations of the men who maintained the other side of the controversy.  From this it was not unnatural to expect difficulties occasioned both by the leader’s temper and by the temper of those whom he led.  But men who had been adverse assured me that they had changed their opinions and were glad to find they could work with Redmond in perfect harmony and that his manners and bearing showed no signs whatever of any bitter memories belonging to the days of internal dispute.”