Speaking at Limerick a few days after his retirement, Mr Redmond avowed that Mr O’Brien’s principles were his own, and added these memorable words:  “But for Mr William O’Brien there would have been no Land Conference and no Land Act.”  Every effort was made to induce Mr O’Brien to withdraw his resignation.  A delegation of the leading citizens of Cork travelled all the way to Mayo to entreat him to reconsider his decision.  To them he said:  “There is not the smallest danger of any split either in the Party, or in the League, or in the country.  There will be a perfectly free field for the development of any alternative policy; and I will not use my retirement in any way whatever to criticise or obstruct; neither, I am certain, will anybody in the country who has any regard for my wishes.”

But having got all they wanted, “the determined campaigners” mysteriously abandoned their determined campaign.  Mr Dillon’s health again required that he should bask ’neath the sunny southern skies of Italy, whilst Mr Davitt betook himself to the United States, without either of them making a single speech or publishing a single suggestion to the tenants how they were to guard themselves against the “inflated prices” and the national insolvency they had been threatening them with.  Having destroyed the plans of the National Directory for testing the Purchase Act they had no guidance of their own to offer.  The tenants were left leaderless, to make their own bargains as best they could, with the inevitable result that the landlords, thanks to “the determined campaigners,” were able to force up prices two years above the standard which the Directory of the League had decided to stand out and fight for.

It used to be said of Daniel O’Connell that whenever The Times praised him he subjected himself to an examination of conscience to find out wherein he had offended as against Ireland.  Likewise one would have supposed that when Mr Dillon found himself patted on the back by the extreme Orange gang he might have asked himself:  “Wherein am I wrong to have earned the plaudits of these people?” For if Mr Dillon was rabid in his opposition to the policy of Conciliation the Ulster Orangemen were ferocious in their denunciation of it, Mr Moore, K.C., referred to it as “the cowardly, rotten, and sickening policy of Conciliation.”  Small wonder that the Orange extremists should have dreaded this policy, since it had already been the means of creating in the North an Independent Orange Order, who unhesitatingly declared as the first article of their creed that they were “Irishmen first of all,” and who had an honest and enthusiastic spokesman in the House of Commons in the person of Mr Thomas Sloane, and an able and, indeed, a brilliant leader in Ireland in Mr Lindsay Crawford.  But so it was—­every advance towards national reconciliation and mutual understanding was opposed by those two divergent forces as if they had a common interest in defeating it.