for which
he stood was one affecting the interests of only a small minority of the
total electorate concerned in the struggle which now spread over both
islands. The Irish problem belonged in reality to the Victorian era;
those in the British electorate whom it could stir to enthusiasm were
stirred by a memory, not by a new gospel. Normally, but for the chance
of Parnell's overthrow, it would have been solved in Gladstone's last
years. For most Liberals, for all Labour men, the fact that it had
passed beyond the sphere of argument meant a lack of driving force. It
was a part of accepted Liberal orthodoxy; minds were centred rather on
those social controversies in which Mr. Lloyd George was the dominant
figure, and upon which opinion had not yet crystallized.

Further, the cry of Protestant liberties in danger, the cause of
Protestants who conducted their arming to the accompaniment of hymns and
prayer, made inevitably a searching appeal to the feelings of an island
kingdom where the prejudice against Roman Catholics is more instinctive
than anywhere else in the world. Looking back on it all, I marvel not at
the difficulties we encountered, but at the success with which we
surmounted them; and the great element in that success was Redmond's
personality. His dignity, his noble eloquence, his sincerity, and the
large, tolerant nature of the man, won upon the public imagination. His
tact was unfailing. In all those years, under the most envenomed
scrutiny, he never let slip a word that could be used to our
disadvantage. This is merely a negative statement. It is truer to say
that he never touched the question without raising it to the scope of
great issues. Nothing petty, nothing personal came into his discourse;
he so carried the national claim of Ireland that men saw in it at once
the test and the justification of democracy.

That is why the Irish cause, instead of being a millstone round the neck
of the parliamentary alliance, was in truth a living cohesive force. But
in order to keep it so it must be pleaded, not as a question for Ireland
only but for the democracy of Great Britain and, in a still larger
sense, for the Commonwealth of the British Empire.

Liberal statesmen in their desire to simplify their own task
underestimated altogether the difficulty which their professed
short-cuts to the goal--or rather, their attempted circuits round
obstacles--created inevitably for the Irish leader. They did not realize
tha