allusion to Shawe-Taylor’s proposal to settle the university issue by conference, but a demand to know the reason for the delay in legislating on it, since the Prime Minister, Chief Secretary, Lord Lieutenant and most of the Cabinet were known to favour it. Acknowledging the Land Act as ‘a great measure’, he left it to other party MPs to demand that landlords be prevented from asking ‘unreasonable’ prices – something Dillon had told him was an ‘absolute necessity’. One such amendment echoed the Freeman’s unrelenting campaign for the abolition of the ‘zones’ as the prime cause of land price inflation. With all this said, his overall message for British politicians of all parties was that no mere reforms could sap the desire for self-government:
If your Government in Ireland were as good as it is notoriously and admittedly bad, we would still be Home Rulers… we say without the slightest hesitation that Ireland would prefer to be governed even badly by her own Parliament than to be governed well by the Parliament of any other nation in the world.57
Wyndham introduced his bill to amend the Land Act on 9 March. Falling far short of what was necessary, it focused solely on the bonus and was soon christened ‘the Landlords’ Bonus Bill’ by the Freeman. Redmond gave notice in May that it was unacceptable if it left the other defects in place.58 Wyndham, however, refused all such changes, and the bill passed all stages in July against Irish party opposition. Redmond’s speech on the Second Reading on 8 July notably failed to mention the zones, despite the daily controversy on the issue raging in the Freeman between Sexton’s editorials and Lord Dunraven. Instead, his focus was on the west: the absence of compulsory acquisition powers for the Congested Districts Board to break up the grass ranches and the failure to provide for re-settling the evicted tenants.59 The National Directory, which only a year previously had hailed the coming Land Act, now branded it a failure due to the ‘effect of the zone system in setting up a false standard of prices in the minds of the Irish landlords’.60 This was despite figures released in August for recent deals in eight counties that showed prices averaging about 20 years’ purchase (and reaching as low as 14.75) of first-term rents, proving, on the Freeman’s own admission, that tenants were making bargains outside the zones as the Act allowed. The paper’s campaign, as Redmond had predicted, was clearly failing to obstruct the Act’s working.61
Throughout the 1904 session, the fall of the Government was widely predicted. The report of the Royal Commission on the South African war had damaged its prestige, while Joseph Chamberlain and others had left the Cabinet over the issue of tariff reform in September 1903. Redmond, having forced Wyndham to admit the abandonment of a University Bill, watched for an opportunity to defeat the Government.62 On 15 March, Irish MPs helped to defeat it by eleven votes in a snap division on a motion on the National Board of Education. At the St Patrick’s Day banquet in London, Redmond spoke of the Government majority of 150 melting away. Over succeeding days, he set out priorities for the next election. They had no obligation to help the Liberals to power in place of the present ‘shattered and discredited’ Unionist Government; a Rosebery-type Liberal administration, wedded to the ‘predominant partner’ idea, would never get Irish votes. His party’s terms for supporting a Liberal administration were firstly that its policy for Ireland must be for Home Rule with no shelving of the question, and secondly that the religious interests of the Irish Catholic people in Great Britain must be safeguarded.63
A revolt by Ulster Unionist MPs further weakened the Government. Ostensibly centred on local issues, behind it lay distrust of the Government, especially of Wyndham and his Catholic Under-Secretary, who had played such an important role in drawing up the terms of the Land Act, regarding their presumed intention to legislate for a Catholic university and suspected general lack of sympathy for Protestant interests. The annual meeting of the Irish Unionist Alliance held on 14 April favoured the reduction of the Irish representation at Westminster. On 12 May, in the first sign that Unionists of that province were seeking a separate political voice, the Ulster Unionist MPs held a meeting at the House of Commons and registered their dissatisfaction with the Government.64
The Labourers Bill, also introduced on 9 March, was a disappointment to all the Irish representatives, who criticized it severely for its insufficient provision of finance to allow for the building of the required cottages. During its Second Reading on 24 June, Redmond and the Unionist leader, Col. Saunderson, united in condemnation of Wyndham’s breaking of pledges.65 The latter was intensely embarrassed but helpless; the inadequacies of the bill signalled, as Gailey notes, the Cabinet’s response to the end of the conciliation policy.66 The Irish Party MP for mid-Cork, D.D. Sheehan, whose Land and Labour Association had campaigned on behalf of the labourers since 1894, and had over 100 branches in the Munster area that would later form a political base for O’Brien, in a survey of the question both comprehensive and impassioned, complained of the red tape that slowed the building process.67 Hoping to salvage something from the bill, Wyndham sent it to Grand Committee. He could not, however, accept a proposal to extend finance on Land Act lines for the building of cottages, and proposed a scheme of his own, which was described by Redmond as being ‘of a most ridiculous and trifling character’. Although Nationalists and Unionists supported an attempt to amend it, Wyndham withdrew the bill on 27 July, to vigorous protest from Redmond and others.68
The session ended, Redmond cut short the pleasures of Aughavanagh in August to cross the Atlantic for the second Convention of the UIL of America, this time held in New York City, and to speak in other eastern and mid-western cities. The stated purpose was to raise $50,000 (£10,000) to fight the coming General Election. Accompanying him were three MPs including Pat O’Brien, along with Amy, twenty-year-old Esther and seventeen-year-old Johanna. Interviewed on arrival, he could speak freely about the Land Act, which was ‘working splendidly’, and prophesized that within fifteen years, ‘the whole of the land of Ireland will have become the property of the people.’69 A Chicago reporter’s pen-picture caught the changes in his physical appearance since the 1890s, wrought by the sedentary life of the House of Commons:
He went late to bed and he arose early, and his program was one of work, work, work, every waking minute… a determined man… from the tips of his square-toed boots to the top of his rapidly thinning iron-grey hair. He is heavy, double-chinned and stocky, but moves with the activity and sprightliness of a girl of sixteen. He is a man in whom well-developed and excellently preserved physical conditions are evident.
As had become his habit in North America, he tailored his oratory to suit local audiences. To his Convention audience, from whom he received pledges of the required sum, he held out for Ireland an ‘absolutely separate existence as a nation’ – an objective as feasible ‘as for Switzerland or any other nation of small dimensions’. A Toronto audience, on the other hand, ‘saw no turbulent Hibernian ranting of his country’s wrongs, but a somewhat fat man in evening dress, who talked of great things accomplished, who brought a message of hope and who took away $1,200.’ At the farewell meeting at Philadelphia on 3 October, by which time a possible initiative on devolution was in the air in Ireland, Redmond seemed to position himself for a pragmatic response:
I do not tell you that we will get everything that we, in our youth, dreamed of as an ideal of a free Ireland… Do not be guilty of the folly of saying that if we can’t get what we want we will take nothing. Keep the flag high, let our ideal