nstitution of their Church had given great experience in management of
business and discussion. Dr. MacDermott, Moderator of the Presbyterian
General Assembly, was the official head of his Church for the year only
and had not equal knowledge of administration. An orator, with a touch
of the enthusiast in his temperament, he was a simple and sympathetic
figure; vehement in his political faith, yet responsive to all the human
charities and deeply a lover of his country. There was no better
representative there of Ulster, of the Ulster difficulty--at once so
separate from and so akin to the rest of Ireland.

The Government nominees included, as was only natural, the most
personally distinguished group. First of them should be named the
Provost of Trinity, Dr. Mahaffy, under whose aegis we assembled--a great
scholar and a great Irishman. He brought with him an element of
independent unregimented political thought--often freakish in
expression, but based on a vast knowledge of men and countries. In a
more practical sense, Lord MacDonnell and Lord Dunraven were our chief
political theorists, devisers by temperament of constitutional
machinery. Lord MacDonnell's repute as an administrator, Lord Dunraven's
as a leading figure in the Land Conference, gave weight to whatever came
from them. Lord Granard, who sat with them, was a Catholic peer who had
commanded a battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment in the Tenth Division
and had held offices in Mr. Asquith's Government. He had now the
brilliant idea of reopening for the period of the Convention one of the
most beautiful eighteenth-century dwellings, Ely House, and making it a
centre of hospitality and a meeting-place for friendly outside
intercourse. Few more useful assistances were rendered to our purpose,
and certainly none more pleasant.

Lord Desart, a distinguished lawyer, acted closely with Lord Midleton.
Sir Bertram Windle, President of University College, was another of
Government's choices--a man of science who was also very much a man of
affairs. Another, far less of a debater, far more of a power, was Mr.
William Martin Murphy, Chairman of the Dublin Tramways, a powerful
employer of labour who had headed the fight against Larkin in 1913, and
had been mainly responsible for the character of the employers' victory.
He was the owner of the most widely circulated Irish paper, the _Irish
Independent_--which stood in journalism for what Mr. Healy represented
in Parliament--