on Ireland's affairs in a strange capital. He spent more of his time in London than in Ireland, but he was never part of the life of London, never in any sense a Londoner. He was part of the life of the House of Commons, for that was his place of work; and when he left it he went to Aughavanagh as a man returns from the City to his home. This home of his was in no sense connected with his active occupations. He was no lover of gardening or of farming; he had none of the Irishman's taste for the overseeing of stock or land; he enjoyed shooting, but he was not a passionate sportsman. What was a passion with him— for he sacrificed much to it—was rest in the place of his choice.
It was not a lonely habitation. He was no recluse, and when there he was always surrounded by his friends. I do not know precisely how one could constitute a list of them—but half a dozen men at least came and went there as they chose. Mr. Mooney, Mr. Hayden, "Long John" O'Connor, Dr. Kenny—these, and above all, Paddy O'Brien, the party's chief acting whip—were constant there. Some came to shoot, and Willie Redmond used to come over from his house at Delgany, where the Glen of the Downs debouches seaward; walking generally, for he was the fastest and most untiring of mountaineers: very few cared to keep beside him on the hills. Others were content to share the daily bathes, morning and afternoon, in a long deep pool where the little stream tumbling down a series of cascades makes a place to dive and swim in. These were the friends of Redmond's own generation, and they were also his son's friends; but the two daughters had their allies, and one way or another the party was apt to be a big one—very simply provided for. When I went there first (in 1907) you climbed a narrow stone stair to the first floor; on the left was a dining-room, beyond that a billiard-room; on the right, Redmond's study, and beyond that his bedroom. Another flight took you to the upper regions, where were two dormitories—the girls to the right, the men to the left. Later, he made some alterations, and the upstair rooms were subdivided off; the garden was developed; it became more of a house and less of a barrack; but the character of the life did not change. It was most simple, most hospitable, most unconventional and most remote.
Certainly a great part of Aughavanagh's charm for him lay in its remoteness. It was seven Irish miles up a hilly road from the nearest railway station, post office or telegraph station. Aughrim was three hours' train journey from Dublin, on a tiny branch line, and trains were few. Until motors brought him (to his intense resentment) within reach, he was as inaccessible as if he had lived in Clare or Mayo.
So it came to pass that though he knew to the very core one typical district of Ireland, and was far more closely in touch with a few score of Irish peasants through their daily life than any of his leading associates, he was yet cut off by his own choice from much that is Ireland—and perhaps from much that was most important to him. Political opinion is created in the towns, and he knew the Irish townsfolk, so far as he could manage it, only through his correspondence, and through those business visits to Dublin which he made as few as possible.
If his work had lain, where it should by rights have lain, in a ministerial office in Dublin, all would have been well. As it was, the deliberate and extreme seclusion of his life in Ireland weakened his influence. He was far too shrewd not to know this, and far too unambitious to care. Work he never shrank from. But the daily solicitations of people with personal grievances to lay before him, personal interests which they desired him to promote, made a form of trouble which in his periods of rest from work he refused to undergo.
The same qualities in him were responsible for his persistent refusal to accept private hospitality where he went on public business. Whether in Ireland or in Great Britain, he must stay at a hotel, and many were the magnates of Liberalism whose ruffled feelings it was necessary to smooth down on this account. He detested being lionized and wanted always, when the public affair was over, to get away to his own quarters.
The demands on him in England for platform work were portentous. Every constituency which wanted a meeting on the Home Rule question wanted Redmond and no other speaker. Of course he could not go to one-twentieth of the places where he was asked for; and his objection to going was not the effort involved but the impossibility either of indefinitely repeating himself or of finding something new to say each time. "If it was in America," he would say, "I would speak as often as you asked me" (it was my misfortune to have to do the asking), "because they never report a speech." The fact is worth noting, for in scores of instances what was adduced by opponents as quotation from his utterances in the United States represented simply some American journalist's impression, perhaps less of what Redmond said than of what, in the reporter's opinion, he should have said. Those who represented him as putting one face on the argument in America and another in Great Britain did not know the man. "I have made it a rule," he said to me more than once, "to say the extremest things I had to say in the House of Commons."
However, all the machinery which was employed by the opponents of Home Rule to prejudice Ireland's case in the British constituencies proved very ineffectual. For one thing, the lesson of South Africa had gone home. For another, and perhaps a greater, no cause ever had a missionary better adapted to the temperament of the British democracy. The dignity and beauty of Redmond's eloquence, the weight which he could give to an argument, his extraordinary gift for simplifying an issue and grouping thoughts in large bold masses—all these things carried audiences with them.
III
Between 1908 and 1910 we were still, though with rapidly increasing success, trying to get a hearing for the Irish question—trying to push it once more to the front. The change of leadership from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to Mr. Asquith had damped Liberal enthusiasm. We got solid work done for Ireland in the University Act of 1908, though Redmond would have preferred a university of the residential type, like that in which he had himself been an undergraduate. A highly contentious measure was also carried in the Land Act of 1909. But a new power was coming to the front, at once assisting and thwarting our efforts. Mr. Lloyd George put a new fighting spirit into Liberalism: but the objects which he had at heart could only be achieved by a great expenditure of electoral power, and among those objects Irish self-government found only a secondary place. When Mr. Gladstone spoke of liberty he thought of what he had helped to bring to Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Montenegro—what he had tried to bring to Ireland. When Mr. Lloyd George spoke of liberty, he thought of what he wanted to bring to England first, and to Ireland by the way; his conviction that Ireland needed self-government was not so deeply rooted as his conviction that the poor throughout the United Kingdom needed help.
Old Age Pensions had been popular, but had not been a fighting issue. Mr. Lloyd George provided the fighting issue with a vengeance when he set himself to pay for them. Unfortunately, Nationalist Ireland had no enthusiasm for the Budget which English Radicalism made its flag. A country of peasant proprietors was easily scared by the very name of land taxes. But above all the Finance Bill dealt drastically, and many thought unfairly, with the powerful liquor trade, which in its branches of brewing and distilling included the main manufacturing interest of southern Ireland, and on its retail side was incredibly diffused through the whole shopkeeping community.
The dissident Nationalists saw their chance. Mr. O'Brien emerged from one of his periodic retirements to lead a whirlwind campaign against the "robber Budget." Redmond and our party were obliged to oppose a measure which pressed so hard as this undoubtedly did on Ireland. Our opposition to the land taxes was withdrawn when valuable concessions had been made, but no such compromise was considered possible on the liquor taxes. On the other hand, it grew clear that the measure was likely to produce a conflict in which the power of the House of Lords might be challenged on the most favourable ground: and for that reason, when the third reading was reached, the Irish party abstained from voting against it. This course, while it facilitated close co-operation with Liberalism in the general election which followed, weakened us in Ireland; and eleven out of the eighty-three Nationalist members returned in January 1910 ranked themselves as outside the party; though Mr. O'Brien's actual following was limited to seven Cork members and Mr. Healy.
IV
The action of the Lords in rejecting the Budget of 1909 had an important personal result. It placed Mr. Asquith in a rôle which no one was ever better qualified to fill—that of a Liberal statesman defending principles of democratic control