Irishmen necessarily among the Tories.  In the movement I saw Willie Redmond go up to one of the fiercest among the Ulstermen, whose face was dark with passion.  Colloquy began:  “Isn’t it a hard thing that you wouldn’t let us speak?” The Ulsterman turned:  “Not let you speak?  My dear fellow, we’d listen to you for as long as you liked—­it’s only these accursed English Liberals.”  And upon this mutual understanding the two Irishmen walked down the floor into the Lobby exchanging expressions of mutual goodwill and possibly of mutual comprehension.

This little piece of by-play, so full of Irish nature, struck me at the time as something more than amusing—­as having in it a ray of hopeful significance.  But the most sanguine imagination would never have foreseen the series of events which brought it to pass, not merely that these two men should wear the same uniform, on a common service, but that the same Gazette should publish both their names as enrolled on the same day in the French Legion of Honour.  On that day Mr. Charles Craig was a prisoner in Germany, wounded in a famous fight; and Willie Redmond was in a grave towards which Ulster comrades had been the first to carry him.  There is an Irish saying, “Men may meet, but the mountains stand apart.”  In July 1911 such an association as the Gazette of July 1917 illustrated would have seemed hardly more possible than the meeting of the everlasting hills.

The dramatic crisis of the parliamentary struggle between the two Houses of Parliament did not, and could not, come in the House of Commons.  Its place was in the final citadel of privilege, and privilege surrendered on August 10th, when the Bill passed the Lords after the most exciting and uncertain division that is ever likely to be known.  But there were elements in the Tory party which did not accept defeat, though they had not yet clearly decided on what battleground to renew their efforts.  For the moment, however, men were disposed to pause and take stock of the new situation.

But at such a time events cannot stand still, and almost at the same moment as the Parliament Act was carried, the Government took a step which gravely affected the Irish party.  Payment of members was established by a resolution of the House of Commons.

Irish Nationalist members had always been paid from the party fund, that is to say, by their supporters.  Payment was conditional, not of right, and it was not made except when the member was in attendance:  it amounted only to twenty pounds a month.  The new payment came from the British Treasury; it was made irrespective of the desire of constituents, or of any other consideration; and it amounted to a sum which in a country of small incomes sounded very imposing.  Unquestionably the receipt of it weakened the position of the party in the eyes of Ireland, and gave a new sting to the charge of a bargain.

All this was clearly discerned in advance, by no one more than by Redmond; and an amendment was moved to strike Irish members out of the application of the resolution.  But the situation was hopelessly involved, the Irish party having repeatedly voted for payment of members as part of the Radical programme which they supported as affecting any normally governed country; and Government refused to make the exception.