committed
himself or his colleagues to anything further than to consider the Bill
in a critical but not a hostile spirit. As to the suggestion that a vote
for the first reading and the printing of the Bill in any sense involved
the party in even a modified acceptance of the measure, in doing so the
Irish members were acting in fulfilment of a pledge given by Mr. Redmond
six months before, when, speaking on September 23rd, he said:--

"When the scheme is produced it will be anxiously and carefully
examined. It will be submitted to the judgment of the Irish people, and
no decision will be come to, whether by me or by the Irish Party, until
the whole question has been submitted to a National Convention. When the
hour of that Convention comes any influence which I possess with my
fellow-countrymen will be used to induce them firmly to reject any
proposal, no matter how plausible, which, in my judgment, may be
calculated to injure the prestige of the Irish Party and disrupt the
National movement, because my first and my greatest policy, which
overshadows everything else, is to preserve a united National Party in
Parliament, and a United powerful organisation in Ireland, until we have
achieved the full measure of National freedom to which we are entitled."

If the Irish Party had not voted for the first reading we should have
been told by their critics that their action was a despotic attempt to
override and smother the freely-expressed opinions of the Irish people,
but it must not be forgotten that it is due to Mr. Redmond's own
initiative that in the case of this Bill, as in the case of the Land
Bill of 1903, the final decision has rested, not, as in the case of the
Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, with the members of the Parliamentary
Party, but, by a sort of referendum, with a National Convention
containing representative Irishmen elected for the purpose from every
part of the country in the most democratic manner. It is worthy of
attention that the very people who five years ago were declaring in
Great Britain that Home Rule was dead and damned were those who were
loudest during the general election in the attempt to raise latent
prejudice on that score, and to bring it to pass that the condition of
things existing twenty years ago was repeated when, as Lord Salisbury
declared in a speech to the National Conservative Club, "all the
politics of the moment are summarised in the one word--Ireland."

In spite of these fac