ter won;
Mr. Churchill spoke at Belfast, but not in the Ulster Hall. There were
angry demonstrations against him; his person had to be strongly
protected and he went away from the meeting by back streets. It was
noticeable that no such precautions were needed for Redmond, who
attended the meeting and walked quite unmolested through the crowd. The
British electorate, as a whole, was somewhat scandalized by the
exhibition of so violent a temper; but the education of the British
electorate was only beginning.

Congestion of business from the previous session deferred the
introduction of the Home Rule Bill till April. Great demonstrations for
and against it were held in advance. In Dublin on March 31st was such a
gathering as scarcely any man remembered. O'Connell Street is rather a
boulevard than a thoroughfare; it is as wide as Whitehall and its length
is about the same. On that day, from the Parnell monument at the north
end to the O'Connell monument at the south, you could have walked on the
shoulders of the people. Four separate platforms were erected, and
Redmond spoke from that nearest to the statue of his old chief. He dwelt
on the universality of the demonstration; nine out of eleven
corporations were represented officially by their civic officers;
professional men, business men, were all fully to the fore. But one
section of his countrymen were conspicuously absent. To Ulster he had
this to say:

"We have not one word of reproach or one word of bitter feeling. We have
one feeling only in our hearts, and that is an earnest longing for the
arrival of the day of reconciliation."

A feature of that gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange
significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then
headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said may be
thus roughly rendered:

"There are as many men here as would destroy the British Empire if they
were united and did their utmost. We have no wish to destroy the
British, we only want our freedom. We differ among ourselves on small
points, but we agree that we want freedom, in some shape or other. There
are two sections of us--one that would be content to remain under the
British Government in our own land, another that never paid, and never
will pay, homage to the King of England. I am of the latter, and
everyone knows it. But I should think myself a traitor to my country if
I did not answer the summons to this gathering, for it is cle