an envenomed Nationalist opposition to the Parliamentary
party.

Mr. Edward Lysaght, the son of a great manufacturer in South Wales,
combined like his father an aptitude for literature and for business; he
wrote books, he was concerned in a publishing venture, but he was
chiefly interested in his farm in county Clare--where he had voted for
de Valera. He had been chosen deliberately as a link with Sinn Fein. It
stamped an aspect of the Convention that he was the youngest man
there--for he would not have been noticeably young in the House of
Commons. We were a middle-aged assembly. Another link, though not so
explicit, with Republican Ireland was Mr. George Russell, "A.E.," poet,
writer on co-operative economics, a mystic, with all a mystic's
shrewdness, an orator with much personal magnetism. Lastly, there was
Sir Horace Plunkett, perhaps the only member of the Convention except
Redmond whose name would have occurred to every Irishman as
indispensably necessary.

Two other personages should be noted. Mr. Walter MacMurrough Kavanagh,
Chairman of the Carlow County Council, was by tradition and training a
strong Unionist, by inheritance the representative of one of the old
Irish princely families. He had been elected to the Vice-Chairmanship of
his County Council while still a Unionist; later, he adhered to Lord
Dunraven's proposals of devolution, but finding no rest in a half-way
house, came into full support of Redmond and for some time was a member
of our party; by temperament deeply conservative, he was in no way
separated by that from many of the ablest Nationalists, lay and
ecclesiastic. As a speaker he had few equals in the Convention; no man
there, indeed, except Redmond, could throw equal passion into the plea
of urgency for a settlement, for I think no other man felt it with such
earnestness.

Captain Doran, Chairman of the Louth Council, was on his way back to
France when the summons to the Convention stopped him. A Methodist, he
was divided by religion from his neighbours in County Louth: but that
did not stop them from putting this prosperous and capable farmer,
working his land on the most modern methods, into the Chair of their
County Council. Before the war, when the Larne gun-running took place,
he decided that matters looked serious, called his friends together and
formed a company of Volunteers, who might be needed to protect
themselves or to protect other Nationalists across the adjacent Ulster
bord