een made the most benign in
his life, as it certainly was one of the most noble.

This memorable meeting of the erstwhile warring hosts agreed
absolutely as to the main conditions on which the Land Settlement of
1903 ought to be preserved--viz. that the abolition of landlordism
should be completed in the briefest possible time, that the rate of
tenant purchasers' annuity should remain undisturbed, and that the
State bonus to the landlords should not be altered. If there were to
be losses on the notation of land loans the loss should be borne by
the Imperial Treasury for the greatest of all Imperial purposes. A
deputation of unequalled strength and unrivalled representative
character was appointed to submit these views to the Prime Minister,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary for Ireland.
But jealous and perverse and, I must add, blindly malignant,
influences had been at work, and a deputation which comprised six
peers, eleven Members of Parliament, and some of the leading public
men in Munster was refused a hearing by Mr Birrell. Though the act was
the act of Mr Birrell, all the world knew that the sinister figure in
the background was Mr Dillon. And they have both paid the penalty
since then of their follies, not to say crimes--though a nation still
suffers for them.

CHAPTER XVII

A NEW POWER ARISES IN IRELAND

The Party manipulators had now got their stranglehold on the country.
The people, where they were not chloroformed into insensibility, were
doped into a state of corrupt acquiescence. All power was in the hands
of the Party. The orthodox daily Press was wholly on their side. The
British public and the English newspaper writers were impressed only,
as always, by the big battalions. The Irish Party had numbers, and
numbers count in Parliament as nothing else does. Whatever information
went through to the American Press passed through tainted sources. An
influential Irish-American priest, Father Eamon Duffy, writing some
time since in the great American Catholic magazine, _The
Monitor_, said:

"We really never understood the situation in America. Ireland was in
the grip of the Party machine and of one great daily paper, and these
were our sources of information. It was only the great upheaval that
awakened us from our dream and showed us that something had been
wrong, and that the Party no longer represented the country."

Th