As a result, Redmond’s following lost much of the prestige which had resulted from scrupulous observance of the understanding that no Nationalist member should take office under Government.  To join the Irish party had been, in effect, for most men, to make a vow of poverty.  Now, on the contrary, it involved acceptance of what was in Ireland’s eyes a well-paid and unlaborious office.  The Irish are no less prone than any other nation to take a cynical view of these matters.

Yet assuredly no man ever gave more service for less pay than the Nationalist leader, and it was the harder because he was a man who liked comfort and had no ambition.  If at the time of the great “split” he had stood down from politics, success would have been assured to him at the Bar in Ireland, or, more surely still, and far more profitably, at Westminster itself.  There never was anyone so well-fitted for the work of a parliamentary barrister who has to deal with great interests before a tribunal largely composed of laymen.  No one had the House of Commons tone more perfectly than Redmond, and no one that I ever heard equalled his gift for making a complicated issue appear simple.  When he was thrown out of Parliament at the Cork election, he thought of retirement, mainly for one reason:  it would be better for his children.  Yet, first by personal loyalty to Parnell, later by his loyalty to Ireland, he was held firm to his task—­always a poor man, always knowing that it lay in his power, without the least sacrifice of principle, to become rich by a way of work less laborious and infinitely less harassing than that which he pursued.

The effect upon the Irish situation produced by the payment of members was slow to develop, and obscure.  But an obvious and grave complication was introduced into both British and Irish politics at the moment when the democratic alliance had achieved its first great objective.  Parliament had been in session almost continuously since the beginning of 1909, with the added strain of two general elections thrown in.  There was a widespread desire to clear the autumn of 1911, so that members might have some breathing space, and, not less important, devote themselves to propagandist work in their constituencies for the new struggle of carrying measures under the hardly won Parliament Act.  Each of these measures must involve a fight prolonged over three years.

But this desire ran against the purposes of Mr. Asquith’s chief lieutenant, whose power and popularity were now at their height.  Mr. Lloyd George in the course of the session had introduced his Insurance Bill, and it was welcomed with astonishing effusion from both sides of the House.  As discussion proceeded, however, the complexity and difficulty of its proposals, and the number of oppositions which they provoked, became so apparent that it was not in human nature for politicians at such a crisis to forgo the opportunity.  Most of the Liberal party would have preferred to