When Mr Dillon, in pursuance of his wire to Mr Davitt, returned from his holiday, he proceeded to make good the threat to be “on the track of Redmond and O’Brien.”  He made himself as troublesome as he could during the Committee stage of the Bill and did his utmost to force its rejection.  He sought to commit the Party to a policy which must have meant the defeat or withdrawal of the measure.  He made vicious personal attacks upon Lord Dunraven.  He did everything in his power to delay and frustrate the passage of the Bill in Committee.  And the most generous construction that can be placed upon his actions is that he did all this in support of the theory, which he is known to have consistently held, that Home Rule should precede the settlement of the Land Question, or any other Irish question.  Notwithstanding Mr Dillon’s criticisms, not then well understood either in the Party or the country, the Bill at length emerged triumphantly from its ordeal, with the good will of all parties in Parliament.  It should have created—­and it would, if it had only been given a fair chance—­a new heaven and a new earth in Ireland.  As far as could be prognosticated all the omens were favourable.  Even the atmosphere of administration, so important a matter where any Irish Act is concerned, was of the most auspicious kind.  The Lord-Lieutenant was Lord Dudley, who was immensely popular in Ireland, and who had made public proclamation of his desire that “Ireland should be governed in accordance with Irish ideas.”  Two out of the three Estates Commissioners, in whose hands the actual administration of the Act lay, were men of whose absolute impartiality the Nationalist opinion of the country was assured.  Sir Antony MacDonnell was the power in Dublin Castle, and not much likely to be intimidated by the permanent gang there.  All that was required was that the Irish Party and the United Irish League should agree upon a broad-based policy for combining the various classes affected to extract the best possible advantage from the provisions of the Act.  A meeting of the National Directory was summoned to formulate such a policy, but shortly before it was held Mr Dillon went down to Swinford and, from the board-room of the workhouse there, definitely raised the standard of revolt against the new Land Act.  Nothing could be said against his action if he had come out from the Party and fulminated against its authority, but to remain a member of the Party and then to indict its conduct of the nation’s business was, to put it mildly, indefensible.  He denounced the new spirit of conciliation that had been so fast gaining ground, attacked the landlords, who had proved themselves friendly to a settlement, in rather ferocious language, and spoke in violent terms of those who would “in a moment of weakness mortgage the future of Ireland to an intolerable extent.”  Clearly Mr Dillon intended carrying out his threat of “taking the field” against Mr Redmond and Mr O’Brien and of damning the consequences.  But the country was not yet “rattled” into disaffection by Mr Dillon’s melancholy vaticinations and rather vulgar appeals to the baser passions of greed and covetousness which are perhaps more firmly rooted in the peasant than in any other class.