decided to submit his arguments to a Convention which, though he was
well aware it would be "packed" against him, yet he had hopes might be
swayed by the invincibility of his arguments. In the ordinary course
the stewards for managing and regulating the Convention would be drawn
from Dublin Nationalists. On this occasion, however, they came by
special train from Belfast and were marched in military order to the
Mansion House, where some sackfuls of policemen's brand-new batons
were distributed amongst them. They were the "Special Constables" of
the Molly Maguires recruited for the first time by an Irish
organisation to kill the right of free speech for which Irishmen had
been contending with their lives through the generations. It would be
quite a comedy of Irish topsy-turvydom were it not, in fact, such a
disastrous tragedy.

The favourite cry of the enemies of Conciliation was that the Purchase
Act would bankrupt the Irish ratepayers. By means which it is not
necessary to develop or inquire into, the British Treasury was induced
on the very eve of the Convention to present to a number of the Irish
County Councils claims for thousands of pounds on foot of expenses for
the flotation of land loans. A base political trick of this kind is
too contemptible for words. It, however, gave Mr Redmond one of the
main arguments for impressing the Convention that the Birrell Bill
could alone save the ratepayers from the imminence of this burden. It
would have been easy to demolish the contention had the reply been
allowed to be made. But this was just the one thing "the bosses" were
determined not to allow--Mr O'Brien had given notice of an amendment,
the justification of which is attested by the facts of the succeeding
twelve years. It expressed the view that the Birrell Land Bill would
lead to the stoppage of land purchase, that it would impose an
intolerable penalty upon the tenant purchasers whose purchase money
the Treasury had failed to provide, and that it would postpone for
fifty years any complete solution of the problem of the West and of
the redistribution of the untenanted grass lands of the country. The
moment Mr O'Brien stood up to move this, at a concerted signal,
pandemonium was let loose. I was never the witness of a more
disgraceful incident--that an Irishman whose life had been given in
so full and generous a fashion to the people should, by secret and
subsidised arrangement, be howled down by an imported gang