land in Mr Lindsay Crawford. But so it
was--every advance towards national reconciliation and mutual
understanding was opposed by those two divergent forces as if they had
a common interest in defeating it.

Mr O'Brien having retired from Cork, the vacancy should, in the
ordinary course, have been filled in the course of a few weeks. But
the Nationalists of "the City by the Lee" made it clear that they
wanted no other representative than Mr O'Brien, and they forbade the
issue of a writ for a new election. And so there was the extraordinary
spectacle of a people who voluntarily disfranchised themselves rather
than give up the last hope of a policy of National Conciliation in
which they descried a Home Rule settlement by Consent as surely as the
abolition of landlordism already decreed. As an example of loyalty and
personal devotion, as well as of patriotic foresight, it would be
difficult to parallel it. Towards the close of the session of 1904 Mr
Jasper Tully, a more or less free lance member of the Party, took it
upon himself to play them the trick of moving the writ for a new
election. And the Nationalists of Cork knew their own business so well
that, without a line of communication with Mr O'Brien, they had him
nominated and re-elected without anybody dreaming that anything else
was humanly possible. There were no conditions attaching to Mr
O'Brien's re-election. He was free to rejoin the Irish Party if it
should resume its position of twelve months ago or to remain out of it
if a policy of mere destruction were persisted in. He was re-elected
because the people of Cork had the most absolute confidence in his
integrity, good faith and political judgment, and because they were
convinced that his return to public life represented the only hope of
the resumption of the great policy in which their confidence never for
a moment wavered.

Within a week of Mr O'Brien's re-election an event took place which once
again made it possible for him to take up the threads of his policy
where he had surrendered them. The landlords' Conference Committee, to
the number of three hundred of the leading Irish nobles and country
gentlemen, met in Dublin and resolved themselves into a new Association,
under Lord Dunraven's leadership, which was named the Irish Reform
Association. It immediately issued a manifesto proclaiming "a policy of
conciliation, of good will and of reform," by means of "a union of all
moderate and progressive opini