Wyndham Act of 1903. This Bill, on the
ground that the finance of the Act of 1903 had broken down, proposed
to increase the rate of interest on land loans from 2-3/4 to 3-1/4 per
cent., and to transform the bonus from a free Imperial grant to a
Treasury debt against Ireland. Apparently it should require no
argument to prove that this was a treacherous repeal of an existing
treaty, guaranteed by considered legislative enactment, and that it
was a proposal which no Irishman with any sense of the duty he owed
his country could for one moment entertain. But it was the unthinkable
and the unbelievable thing which happened. Mr Dillon was determined,
at all costs--and how heavy these costs were, one hundred thousand
unpurchased tenants in Ireland to-day have weighty reason to know--to
wreak his spite against the Wyndham Act, which he had over and over
again declared was working too smoothly, and prayed that he might have
the power to stop it. Mr Redmond I regard in all this wretched
business as the unwilling victim of the forces which held him, as a
vice in their power. Yet from the sin of a weak compliancy in the
unwise decrees of others he cannot be justly acquitted. Although the
Party had rejected the proposal for a new Land Conference, and thereby
broken the articles of reunion under which Mr O'Brien and his friends
re-entered it, we continued to remain within its fold. We could not,
for one thing, believe that the country was so steeped in ignorance
and blindness that if the facts were once allowed to reach it, or the
arguments to be temperately addressed to any free assembly of
Irishmen, they would not see where national interests lay. Accordingly
Mr O'Brien and his friends determined to submit, in constitutional
fashion, the overwhelming objections to Mr Birrell's Bill to the
judgment of the National Convention which was to consider whether the
Bill would expedite or destroy land purchase. It was conveyed to Mr
O'Brien beforehand that it was madness on his part to attempt to get a
hearing at the Convention, that this was the last thing "the powers
that be" would allow, and that as he valued his own safety it would be
better for him to remain away.

Just as he had never submitted to intimidation when it was backed by
the whole force of the British Government, Mr O'Brien was equally
resolved that the arrogance of the new masters of the Irish democracy
was not going to compel him to a mood of easy yielding and he properly