definitely each to go
our own ways; for a painful part of the situation was that all of us had
been used to act together, and none now felt himself free of some
obligation. This had to be cleared up When we came down to Trinity
College that morning, the news met us that Redmond was dead.

The Convention adjourned its work, although time pressed most seriously,
till after the interment. Ireland is a country where a public man can
always count on a good funeral. The body was brought to Kingstown, and
thence by special train to Wexford, where he had expressed the wish to
be laid, in the burying-place of his own people and in the town with
which he had been most closely associated. Hundreds of men came from
distant parts to mark their sorrow and respect: what remained of him was
carried in long and imposing procession through the streets. Over the
grave Mr. Dillon, who had been chosen to succeed him in the chair of the
Irish party, spoke eloquent and fitting words. Some day, no doubt, a
monument to his memory will be set up in the streets of Wexford, where
his great uncle's statue stands, and where will be placed the memorial
to his gallant brother, subscribed for from all parts of the kingdom and
from all Irish regiments in the Army.

But I say without hesitation that the first and most striking endeavour
to put in lasting shape a tribute to John Redmond was made in the
Convention, not by great men, but by the ordinary rank and file of Irish
Nationalists, who went back from the graveside to the work which his
death had interrupted.

Those who had been inclined before to accept his advice--still standing
on our minutes--were now more than ever determined to follow it. That
advice was not to refuse the hand of friendship which offered itself
from men who by alliance with us could take away from the Home Rule
demand all sectarian character: who could bring for the first time a
great and representative body of Irish landlord opinion and Irish
Protestant opinion into line with the opinion of Irish tenants and Irish
Catholics. In order to act upon this advice men needed to face a
powerful combination of forces and much threatened unpopularity: they
had to encounter the hostility of an able and vindictively conducted
newspaper; they had to separate themselves politically from the united
voice of their own hierarchy; they had to break away from the politician
who for many years now had equalled Redmond in his influence in Irelan