bs. They drank deep of the doctrines of a
heroic age. Centenary celebrations were held throughout the country,
at which men were exhorted to study the history of an era when men
were proud to die for the land they loved. For a space we listened to
the martial music of other days, and our hearts throbbed to its
stirring notes. The soul of the nation was uplifted above the squalid
rivalries of the "'ites" and the "'isms." It awaited a unifying
influence and a programme which would disregard the factions and leave
a wide-open door for all Nationalists to come in, no matter what sides
they had previously taken or whether they had taken any at all.

This wide-open door and this broad-based programme the United Irish
League offered. Mr Dillon attended the inaugural meeting, but from
what Mr O'Brien tells us he did not seem to grasp the full
potentialities of the occasion, "and he made his own speech without
any indication that any unusual results were expected to follow." Mr
Timothy Harrington, one of the leading and most levelheaded of the
Parnellite members, also attended, in defiance of bitter attack from
his own side, showing a moral courage sadly lacking in our public men,
either then or later. By what I cannot help thinking was a most
fortuitous circumstance for the League, at a moment when its existence
was not known outside three or four parishes, Mr Gerald Balfour
determined to swoop down upon it and to crush it with the whole might
of the Crown forces. Two Resident Magistrates and the Assistant
Inspector-General of Constabulary, with a small army corps of special
police, were sent to Westport. Result--the inevitable conflict between
the police and people took place, prosecutions followed, extra police
taxes were put on and a store of popular resentment was aroused, the
League getting an advertisement which was worth scores of organisers
and monster meetings. I am myself satisfied that it was the ferocity
of the Crown attack upon the League which gave it its surest passport
to popular favour. Whilst the United Irish League was struggling into
life in the west I was engaged in the south in an attempt to lead the
labourers out of the bondage and misery that encompassed them--their
own sad legacy of generations of servitude and subjection--but I am
nevertheless pleased to recall now that, as the editor of a not
unimportant provincial newspaper in Cork, I followed the early
struggles of the new League with sympathy and g