s "not to be bitten by the Unity dog." Mr Healy's
newspaper and influence took a similar bent. Mr Dillon's majority, as
usual helpless and indecisive, promulgated no particular policy. For
Mr O'Brien and the United Irish League there could be no such
balancings or doubts. It is good also to be able to say of Mr Davitt
that he assisted in fighting the insidious attempt to denationalize
the County and District Councils. The League and its supporters won
all along the line. The few reverses they sustained were negligible
when compared with the mighty victories they obtained all over
Ireland, and when the elections were over the League was established
in an impregnable position as the organisation of disinterested and
genuine nationality.

The Parliamentarians, seeing how matters stood, and no doubt with a
wise thought of their own future, now proceeded to compose their
quarrels. They saw themselves forgotten of the people, but they were
resolved apparently that the people should not forget them. They took
their cue from a country no longer divided over sombre futilities, and
unable to make up their minds for themselves they accepted the
judgment of the country once they were aware that it was irrevocably
come to. Mr Dillon after his re-election to the chair of his section
in 1900 immediately announced his resignation of the office, and
being, as we are assured on the authority of Mr O'Brien, always
sincerely solicitous for peace with the Parnellites, he caused a
resolution to be passed binding the majority party in case of reunion
to elect as their chairman a member of the Parnellite Party, which
numbered merely nine.

Naturally Mr Redmond and his friends did not hesitate to close with
this piece of good fortune, which opened an honourable passage from a
position of comparative isolation to one of triumph and power. The
Healyites, whose quarrel appeared to be wholly with Mr Dillon, to whom
Mr Healy in sardonic mood had attached the sobriquet of "a melancholy
humbug," made no difficulty about falling in with the new arrangement,
and the three parties forthwith met and signed and sealed a pact for
reunification without the country in the least expecting it or,
indeed, caring about it. Probably the near approach of a General
Election had more to do with this hastily-made pact than any of the
nobler promptings of patriotism. I believe myself the country would
have done much better had the United Irish League gone on with its