branches of the United Irish League, all branches of the Hibernians and Foresters, all county and district councils sent up their chosen men, to whom were added such clergy as chose to attend.  The result was a mass of over two thousand persons packed into a single room; they deliberated in the physical conditions of a crowd; hearing was difficult, disorder only too easily brought about.  I have seen one of these Conventions sharply divided in opinion, and counting of votes would have been impossible.  On this day, however, there was only one opinion:  the business was to manifest support and to strengthen the leader’s hand, Redmond at the outset laid down the proposition that it was their “duty” as Nationalists to accept what he described as a far better Bill than Gladstone ever offered.  He further indicated the need for a resolution that the question of supporting, proposing or rejecting amendments should be left to the Irish party.  This was promptly carried by acclamation.  All decisions were unanimous that day.

But before this or any other resolution was put to the Convention, Redmond asked the multitude there to give, what they gave most willingly, a welcome to Mr. Gladstone’s grandson, who as a young member of Parliament had just voted for the Bill.  The greeting which he received showed that Ireland had not forgotten what Gladstone’s last years had been.

In the first of his speeches upon the Bill, Sir Edward Grey, a survivor from Gladstone’s Ministry, said, as he threw a glance back over the struggle from 1886 to 1893: 

“Two things stirred me at the time; they stir me still.  One is Mr. Gladstone’s intense grip of the fact that there was a national spirit in Ireland, and the splendour of the effort he made in his last years to acknowledge and reconcile that spirit.  The other is the Irish response to Mr. Gladstone.  It was not the assent of mere tacticians who had gained an advocate and a point.  It was genuine, warm and living feeling, a response of gratitude and sympathy the same in kind and as living as his own.”

If Redmond’s task from 1912 onwards was not lightened by the existence of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith’s Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame.  There was no intense grip of any fact in the Government’s attitude, and on one cardinal point they were unstable as water.  Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction of the Bill, had used the words:  “What argument is there that you can raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east province?” Redmond, following him, made one of his few false moves in debate.  “Is that the proposal?  Is that the demand?” he asked.  Sir Edward Carson shot the question at him:  “Will you agree to it?” Seldom does the House see a practised speaker so much embarrassed; Redmond in confusion passed to another topic.  He was soon to be confronted with that same line of reasoning, pushed not dialectically by an opponent, but as a step in parliamentary negotiation from the Treasury Bench.  Mr. Churchill, who introduced the Second Reading, made it apparent that the demonstration in Belfast had not been wasted on him.