the imminence of this burden.  It would have been easy to demolish the contention had the reply been allowed to be made.  But this was just the one thing “the bosses” were determined not to allow—­Mr O’Brien had given notice of an amendment, the justification of which is attested by the facts of the succeeding twelve years.  It expressed the view that the Birrell Land Bill would lead to the stoppage of land purchase, that it would impose an intolerable penalty upon the tenant purchasers whose purchase money the Treasury had failed to provide, and that it would postpone for fifty years any complete solution of the problem of the West and of the redistribution of the untenanted grass lands of the country.  The moment Mr O’Brien stood up to move this, at a concerted signal, pandemonium was let loose.  I was never the witness of a more disgraceful incident—­that an Irishman whose life had been given in so full and generous a fashion to the people should, by secret and subsidised arrangement, be howled down by an imported gang and prevented from presenting his views in rational fashion to men the majority of whom at least were present for honest consideration of arguments.  It is a thing not easily forgotten or forgiven for the Irishmen who engineered it, that such a ferocious and foolish display of truculent cowardice should have taken place.  For an hour Mr O’Brien manfully faced the obscene chorus of cat-cries and disorder.  He describes one of the incidents that occurred in the following words:—­

“While I was endeavouring, by the aid of a fairly powerful voice, to dominate the air-splitting clamour around me, Mr Crean, M.P., on the suggestion of Father Clancy, attempted to reach me, in order to urge me to give up the unequal struggle.  He was no sooner on his legs than he was pounced upon by a group of brawny Belfast Mollies and dragged back by main force, while Mr Devlin, with a face blazing with passion, rushed towards his colleague in the Irish Party, shouting to his lodgemen:  ‘Put the fellow out.’  At the same time Father Clancy, Mr Sheehan, M.P., and Mr Gilhooly, M.P., having interposed to remonstrate with Mr Crean’s assailants, found themselves in the midst of a disgraceful melee of curses, blows and uplifted sticks, Mr Sheehan being violently struck in the face, and one of the Molly Maguire batonmen swinging his baton over Mr Gilhooly’s head to a favourite Belfast battle-cry:  ‘I’ll slaughter you if you say another word.’”

So does this Convention go down to history as the beginning of an infamous period when the sanctity of free speech was a thing to be ruthlessly smashed by the hireling or misguided mobs of an organisation professing democratic principles.  The miracle of the Easter Rising was that it put an end to the rule of the thug and the bludgeonman.  But many things were to happen in between.

Certain police court proceedings followed, in which Mr Crean, M.P., was the plaintiff.  The only comment on these that need now be made is that Mr Crean’s summons for assault was dismissed, and he was ordered to pay L150 costs or to go to gaol for two months, whilst the police magistrate who tried the case was shortly afterwards rewarded with the Chief Magistracy of Dublin!