that the essential of his proposal was the
maintenance of a common customs system, leaving the fixation of customs
to the Imperial Parliament for Great Britain and Ireland. If this was
denied, as it would be by the acceptance of Mr. Murphy's amendment, all
Unionists would be driven once more into the same lobby; all chance of
uniting elements heretofore divided would disappear.

This was the fact against which we were brought up. Insistence on the
full Nationalist demand as it had been outlined in the Convention meant
the refusal of a new and powerful alliance which now offered itself, and
the destruction of anything which could be called an agreement.

In the close, Lord Midleton reinforced his appeal by a solid material
argument. The sub-committee presided over by Lord MacDonnell had reached
unanimous conclusions embodying proposals for the completion of land
purchase within a very brief period. Landlords, agents, tenants,
representatives for Ulster as well as from the South and West, were
parties to this plan. Lord Midleton now looked back on the past as one
who had been in the fight since Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill.
Every fresh settlement had been wrecked, he said, by standing for the
last shred of the demand. In 1885, if Gladstone had abandoned the
identity of democratic franchise for both countries and had made to the
Irish minority such concessions as this Convention was willing to make,
he would have carried the Liberal Unionist element with him. Then, as
now, a great land purchase scheme depended on the solution of the main
problem. To-day land purchase stood or fell with the Convention.

He was backed by Lord Dunraven--who waived his preference for his own
original proposal--and by Lord Desart, in most able argument: the latter
declaring that the proposal to give Ireland a separate customs system
could never be carried in England. But the speech of the day came from
Mr. Kavanagh, who, speaking as a Nationalist who had been a Unionist,
ended a most moving appeal for agreement with a declaration that he at
all events would vote for the compromise. There was no mistaking the
effect produced by the earnestness of this speaker, who knew as much of
Ireland and was as well fitted to judge of its true interests as any man
in the room. That effect was felt, I think, in the tone of a private
meeting of Nationalists held the same night. Redmond, with the art of
which he was a master, indicated support for the