equivalent to three years' purchase--was produced
to bridge the gap between what the tenants could afford to pay and the
landlords to accept. The Bill fell short of the requirements of the
Land Conference in certain respects, notably in that it proposed to
withhold one-eighth of the freehold from the tenants as an assertion
of State right in the land, and that the clauses dealing with the
Evicted Tenants and Congested questions were vague and inadequate.
Other minor defects there also were, but nothing that might not be
remedied in Committee by conciliatory adjustments. A National
Convention was summoned for 16th April to consider whether the Bill
should be accepted or otherwise. Previously there was much
subterranean communication between Messrs Dillon, Davitt, Sexton and
T.P. O'Connor, all with calculated intent to damage or destroy the
Bill. And it is also clear that certain members of the Irish Party
(Messrs Dillon and T.P. O'Connor), who were pledge-bound to support
majority rule "in or out of Parliament," were carrying on official
negotiations of their own with the Minister in charge of the Bill and
were using the organ of the Party to discredit principles and
proposals to which the Party had given its unanimous assent. It would
not, in the circumstances, be unjust to stigmatise this conduct as
disloyalty, if not exactly treachery, to the recorded decisions of the
Party. At any rate it was the source and origin of incredible mischief
and the most deplorable consequences to Ireland. The opponents of the
Bill made a concerted effort to stampede the National Convention from
arriving at any decision regarding the Bill. They wanted it to
postpone judgment. But the Convention, in every sense magnificently
representative of all that was sound and sincere in the constitutional
movement, was too much alive to all the glorious possibilities of the
policy of national reconciliation which was taking shape and form
before their eyes to brook any of the ill-advised counsels of those
who had determined insidiously on the wreck of this policy.

In all the great Convention there were only two voices raised in
support of the rejection of the Bill. And when Mr Davitt moved the
motion, concerted between Mr T.P. O'Connor, Mr Sexton and himself,
that the Convention should suspend judgment until it was brought in
its amended Third Reading Form before an adjourned sitting of the
Convention, he was so impressed by the enthusiastic unanimi