d time--at the
end of which time, failing the production of the volunteers, other
measures must be taken. Here, however, we are back in the region of
speculation. Conscription was proposed and anarchy let loose in Ireland.
Redmond's words, "Better for us never to have met than to have met and
failed," stand as the final sentence on this notable episode in Irish
history.

That is the Convention's epitaph as, I think, he would have written it.
How shall we write his own?

No attempt has been made in this book, and none shall be made, to
represent him as a hero. But there are certain attributes which malice
itself can scarcely deny him. All his ideals were generous. His love of
country, the master-motive in his life, had nothing in it exclusive or
tribal or partisan. His was a policy forward-looking and constructive;
without narrowness or jealousy, it aimed to bring the destinies of
Ireland into the hands of Irishmen, not greatly caring what Irishmen
they were--indeed, if they were in a real measure responsible to
Ireland, not caring at all. In this spirit he grasped masterfully at the
chance which the war offered; in this spirit, he went out to meet his
fellow-countrymen in the Irish Convention.

And not only towards his countrymen was he magnanimous. His love of
Ireland was free from all attendant hates. His resentment was never on
private grounds, and it was without rancour. He spent his whole life in
opposition, and was not embittered; his mind remained constructive after
thirty years spent in criticism. His experience of political life and of
English Ministers had rid him of any credulous faith in mankind; yet his
instinct was always to perceive the best in men. The friend who knew him
best in Convention, and who had seen him in his darkest hours then and
long ago, said this of him: "He was always an optimist." The speaker did
not mean--he could not have meant--that in those last months Redmond was
sanguine. He meant, I think, that he had faith; that in a country where
suspicion is the prevailing disease, he credited men with honest motives
and with his own love of Ireland.

If he went wrong at any time, he went wrong by too generous a judgment
of other men, too open-handed a policy. Perhaps, too, he may have
erred--it was his characteristic defect--in not pressing his policy upon
others with more vehemence. He had not the temperament which, when once
possessed with an idea, rests neither night nor day in pursuit