order to reap the benefit of our victory, seems to me an incomprehensible policy (cheers)... but by what is now derided as a policy of conciliation we can, under the Land Act, transform the whole face of Ireland….30
It was not enough for O’Brien, who told him that he had ‘lost a great opportunity’ in not condemning explicitly the spreading revolt:
But, of course, the mass of the people don’t understand the danger, and you alone, who represents as no other man can do the unity of the country, can give the people the necessary warning before it is too late….31
By 2 November, O’Brien had accepted that he could not persuade Redmond into battle. He warned him that he was ‘deliberating anxiously what to do’. Two days later, he dropped his bombshell. The situation had become untenable for him. Unable to take action against the ‘wreckers’ without Redmond’s lead, he would announce his withdrawal from public life and the cessation of his paper, the Irish People. He expected his disappearance to ‘silence all the evil elements’.32 In a public letter that mystified the nation on 6 November, he justified his withdrawal as allowing the critics to put their alternative policy before the country, avoiding a return to the horrors of conflict with old colleagues. However, his accompanying indictment of the critics’ disloyalty to party policy, had Redmond endorsed it at this point, would have left a weakened leader to defend the conciliation policy alone, bereft of newspaper support and facing a likely challenge to his leadership.33
Redmond’s reply to O’Brien on 9 November registered his shock. He was ‘disheartened and depressed’, and could not see his way clearly at all, but hoped that O’Brien would listen to the ‘unanimous voice of the country’.34 Writing to Dillon, he pointed already in the only direction he could move. Fearing that O’Brien’s resignation would have ‘very serious consequences in the country’, and urging that meetings of the party and the Directory be held to appeal to him to reconsider, he had yet:
… no belief that such a resolution would have any influence with O’Brien. I am not thinking of that, but of the steadying effect upon the mind of the country of such a meeting and the proof it would afford of our continued solidarity.35
Dillon was against any meetings until they could be sure that no general discussion, and no resolution denouncing the Freeman, would be raised.36 These assurances Redmond was ready to give. By the time he spoke at a Limerick UIL public meeting on 15 November, he had recovered his nerve somewhat and was ready to adjust his rhetoric to the new realities. O’Brien’s contribution had been indispensable; the Land Act was ‘the outcome of his genius and his labours’. No man living deplored his retirement more than he, Redmond, did. He fully adhered to the conciliation policy, both in its narrow application to the land question and in its broader meaning as ‘the union of all classes in Ireland that Thomas Davis once dreamt of… as would make Home Rule inevitable’. However, he affected to see:
… no indication whatever that there is any rejection or repudiation of such a policy by the people as would render necessary or desirable the resignation of Mr O’Brien… [but] indications in many parts of Ireland that the irreconcilable section of Irish landlords have once more got the upper hand.
They must ‘steady their ranks’, he said, and allow nothing, not even the great blow of O’Brien’s departure, to disrupt the movement. He begged all representatives of the people ‘to abstain from any bitter language of attack or denunciation’. In O’Brien’s view, this meeting, which had threatened to end Redmond’s career, turned out to be its salvation.37
Thus was public debate on O’Brien’s resignation stifled in the interests of unity. The dissidents could not prevent tenants striking bargains with landlords, but were left free to ensure that the Land Act yielded no nation-building political dividend. If O’Brien thought that his withdrawal would galvanize public opinion against the dissidents, he was wrong.38 While resolutions poured in expressing regret (and puzzlement) at the move, they were couched in personal rather than ideological terms. Behind closed doors, acrimony raged. Laurence Ginnell, a Dillonite official at the UIL head office, complained to Redmond that ‘people who come to the office to seek grave advice are edified by hearing the “Gen. Sec.” [John O’Donnell MP, an O’Brien protégé] swear by God if he had a hold of Tom Sexton the Bastard he would wring the said Bastard’s head off.’39
Ginnell claimed that most branches did not support the Directory’s ‘long and degrading set of resolutions’ of 8 September, and also alleged that it was doing nothing at all to advise tenants. ‘The organization is being strangled,’ he wrote, ‘and it is entitled to expect that you will not lead it to extinction knowingly.’40 From the other side, Lord Dunraven was ‘much distressed and perturbed’ at O’Brien’s resignation. The great majority of the people were in favour of the general conciliation policy based on ‘a fair and businesslike settlement’ of the land question:
It is cruel to Ireland and heart-breaking to me to think that all the infinite possibilities of expansion in every direction, social, industrial, political, should be thus recklessly chucked away. If discord is to prevail[,] never again need Ireland appeal to Parliament for anything and Mr Wyndham’s hands will be paralysed in dealing with the evicted tenants, the congested districts and the labourers [that is, the promised follow-on legislation after the Land Act].41
Redmond had made his choice, but was left temporarily disoriented. T.P. O’Connor, who had urged his friend Dillon to avoid a split with Redmond, painted a picture of demoralization in December: ‘In the House we are practically left to Redmond and myself; Redmond short-sighted and living from hand to mouth politically….’42
II
The charge of political cowardice in his handling of the conciliation dispute has been levelled at Redmond down the years by contemporaries and others, beginning with O’Brien himself, who wrote in 1910:
He developed now for the first time a perverse habit, which was to be his invariable rule of conduct in the five following years. It was to exploit the wholesome popular horror of a split in order not to disarm those who were violating every law of discipline and party loyalty to create a split, but in order to… purchase a nominal unity, at the expense of all that made unity worth having.43
For Healy, Redmond was now the cat’s-paw of Dillon rather than of O’Brien, and had sacrificed all independence of judgment. He wrote to his brother Maurice in 1905: ‘Redmond is a poor creature; Dillon an ass….’ At an election meeting, he charged that Redmond ‘could not call his soul his own’.44 Philip Bull has written that Redmond, in opting for Dillon over O’Brien, ‘followed where he should have led, and demonstrated a fatal predisposition to be over-dependent on others’. Other scholars have been kinder. For Lyons, O’Brien’s attitude reflected an intolerant disposition of mind, and Redmond’s refusal to comply with his wishes was rooted in a rational calculation of the powerful weight of opinion represented by Dillon, Davitt and Sexton. Maume points out the real potential for a new nationwide split, given Dillon’s financial