r
interrupted but did not terminate--and which, though still recent, are
blurred in public memory by all that has intervened. Further back still,
a brief review of his early career must be given, not only to set the
man's figure in relation to his environment, but to show that this final
phase was in reality no new departure, no break with his past, but a
true though a divergent evolution from all that had gone before.

* * * * *

Ireland, although so small in extent and population, is none the less a
country of many and locally varying racial strains; and John Redmond
sprang from one of the most typical. He was a Wexfordman; that is to
say, he came from the part of Ireland where if you cross the Channel
there is least difference between the land you leave and the land you
sail to; where the sea-divided peoples have been always to some extent
assimilated. Here in the twelfth century the first Norman-Welsh invaders
came across. The leader of their first party, Raymond Le Gros, landed at
a point between Wexford and Waterford; the town of Wexford was his
first capture; and where he began his conquest he settled. From this
stock the Redmond name and line descend.

Thus John Redmond came from an invading strain in which Norman and Celt
were already blended; and he grew up in a country thickly settled with
men whose ancestors came along with his from across the water. Till a
century ago the barony of Forth retained a dialect of its own which was
in effect such English as men spoke before Chaucer began to write; and
even to-day in any Wexford fair or market you will see among the strong,
well-nourished, prosperous farmers many faces and figures which an
artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional
John Bull. Redmond himself, hawk-faced and thick-bodied, might have been
taken for no bad reincarnation of Raymond Le Gros. To this extent he was
less of a Celt than many of his countrymen; but he was assuredly none
the less Irish because he was a Wexfordman. The county of his birth was
the county which had made the greatest resistance to English power in
Ireland since Sarsfield and his "Wild Geese" crossed to Flanders. Born
in 1857, he grew up in a country-side full of memories of events then
only some sixty years old; he knew and spoke with many men who had been
out with pike or fowling-piece in 1798. Rebel was to him from boyhood up
a name of honour; and this was not onl