All of these five men were Government nominees, as were also Lord Granard and Sir Bertram Windle, who in different ways gave Redmond complete and most useful backing.  It would have been possible to call together a group consisting of men who had been members of the national organization which would have excluded all these and included the Bishops;[10] but Redmond probably felt it would be ungracious to do this.  His chief desire was to avoid all recognition of party and still more of partisan machinery.  His conclusion was to do nothing; and it was a conclusion to which he was prone at all times when he did not see his way clear.  This temperamental disinclination to take any action which might create difficulties was in these days at its height with him.  Since the spring his usually perfect health had been failing; he suffered from the physical inertia which accompanies the growth of a fatal disease; and sorrow upon sorrow, rebuff upon rebuff, had weakened the resilience of his mind.  It was not that he lacked courage or confidence in his own judgment; but he was bound as a statesman to make allowance for the estimate which others, his followers, would put upon that judgment when he declared it.  Sensitive by nature, he was deeply aware of failure which had resulted from the most disparaging of causes—­not flat rejection, but belated, half-hearted and blundering adoption, of whatever course he had proposed.  He overrated, I am sure, the extent to which his personal position had been depreciated in the minds of those who were there.  It was true, as the event was to prove, that he could no longer count on unquestioning support of any policy simply on the ground that he advocated it; but any opinion which he presented would have been commended not only by the cogency of his argument but by an old esteem for his wisdom, and, above and beyond this, by a personal feeling Men would have inclined to his side not for the argument’s sake only, but for his sake.

There was felt, too, precisely at the moment when it mattered most, the defect in his quality as leader.  He lacked the personal touch.  It was not that he would not, but that he could not, put himself into contact with the individual minds of men.  He owed it, I think, to the rank and file to give them more of his guidance than they actually received.  He was a genial presence when they met; but of confidential discussion upon details I am sure that nothing passed.  Had he called the group together, had he spoken his mind to them collectively, in confidence, things would in all ways have been better.  But there was ingrained in him a sort of shyness, a repugnance to force his view on others by argument, an indisposition to controversy, which was his limitation; and all this was at this time accentuated by the hurt sense that there would be always in men’s minds a memory, not of the hundred times when his wisdom had amply justified itself, but of recent occasions when he had advised them and the result was not what he foretold.