ish question.' Ireland must in ages gone have
been guilty of abominable crimes, or she could not at this juncture have
been afflicted with a John Redmond."

Politicians everywhere need to grow tough skins; but Redmond, though he
was a veteran in politics, had no special gift that way. It was not
pleasant for the Nationalist leader, when an assembly of Irishmen were
called together to attempt the framing of a Constitution, to find
himself the object, and the sole object, of public insult; it was not
pleasant for him to feel that he might at any time be subjected to a
renewal of this experience in the streets of Ireland's capital, where he
had been acclaimed as a hero so few years ago. It was not pleasant for
him to feel that whenever he took up a book or paper dealing with
Ireland he was liable to come upon some outburst such as the one which I
have quoted. These things were pin-pricks, yet pin-pricks administered
in public; and the mere effort to endure such things without wincing
saps a man's vitality. Behind them lay the definite repudiation of his
policy in election after election--for Kilkenny City followed the
example of Clare and replaced Pat O'Brien by a Sinn Feiner. He was
repudiated in the eye of the world, and repudiated with every
circumstance of contumely. Plainly in the Convention he could no longer
claim to speak for Ireland; that limited gravely his power to serve.

I think, however, that deep in his heart a resentment, all the more
rankling because he gave it no voice, prompted him to be on his guard
against lending the least colour of justification to any plea that in
the Convention he had sought to pledge Ireland without due mandate or
had committed anyone but himself. All that was personal in his
resources--his labour, his experience, his judgment, his eloquence--all
this he put unreservedly at the Convention's service: but he abstained,
and I think not only out of policy but as the result of silent anger,
from making the least use of that authority which he still possessed and
which he might easily have augmented. If in the result he took too
little upon him, lest anyone should ever say he had taken too much, and
if because he left too much to others Ireland was the loser, Ireland
must bear not the loss only but the blame.

Many even of those who most agreed with his action had, under the
influence and events of these years and of public comments on these
events, lost confidence in him. Some weeks