sociation was all the more
wanton, because Mr Dillon's persuasion, which gave rise to it that the
Association had been brigaded into my secret service for some
nefarious purpose of my own, was as absurdly astray as all the rest of
his troubled dreams of my Machiavellian ambitions. To avoid giving any
pretext for such a suspicion, I declined to accept any office or
honour or even to become a member of the Land and Labour Association,
attended no meeting to which Mr Redmond and Mr Dillon were not invited
as well as I; and beyond my speeches at those meetings, never in the
remotest degree interfered in the business or counsels of the
Association. A number of men on the governing council of the
Association were to my knowledge, and continued to be, sympathisers
with my critics. Beyond the fact that their president, Mr Sheehan,
M.P., happened to be the most successful practiser of my Land Purchase
plans in the county of Cork, as well as by far the ablest advocate the
Labourers' agitation had called into action, I know of no shadow of
excuse for the extraordinary folly which led responsible Irishmen,
with the cry of 'Unity' on their lips, not only to decline to meet me
on a common platform, but to make tens of thousands of absolutely
unoffending labourers the victims of their differences with me.

"Despite their aloofness and their attempts to divide the Labourers'
body, the agitation swept throughout the south of Ireland with an
intensity which nothing could withstand. Demonstrations of amazing
extent and still more remarkable resoluteness of spirit were addressed
by my friends and myself in Charleville and Macroom, County Cork;
Kilfinane and Drumcolliher, County Limerick; Tralee and Castle Island,
County Kerry; Scariff, County Clare; Goolds Cross, County Tipperary;
and Ballycullane, County Wexford; and by the time they were over, the
field was fought and won. One last difficulty remained; but it was a
formidable difficulty. So far from Mr Redmond's 'almost daily
communications with Mr Bryce' reaching back to the critical days of
the problem, we were already in the first days of summer in the
session of 1906 when a communication was made to me from a high
official quarter that the Irish Government were so deeply immersed in
the Irish Council Bill of the following year that they shrank from the
labour and the financial difficulties of a Labourers' Bill in the
current session, and an appeal was diplomatically hinted as to whet