Devlin was sent down to the Convention to represent the Party and the League.  It was sought to exclude a considerable number of properly accredited Labour delegates from the Convention, but after a stiff fight my friends and myself compelled the admission of a number just barely sufficient to secure me a majority.  This was heralded as a tremendous triumph for the Labour movement, and it spoke something for the democratic constitution of the United Irish League, as drafted by Mr O’Brien, that it was possible for an outsider to beat its official nominee and thereby to become the officially adopted candidate of the League himself.  In due course I entered the portals of the Irish Party, but though in it was, to a certain extent, not of it, in that I was more an observer of its proceedings than an active participant in its work.  My supreme purpose in public life was to make existence tolerable for a class who had few to espouse their claims and who were in the deepest depths of poverty, distress and neglect.  Hence, except where Labour questions and the general interests of my constituents were concerned, I stood more or less aloof from the active labours of the Party.  I was in the position of a looker-on and a critic, and I saw many things that did not impress me at all too favourably.

In the years immediately following the General Election of 1900 the Party had a splendid solidarity and a fine enthusiasm.  There had been just sufficient new blood infused into it to counteract the jealous humours and to minimise the weariness of spirit of those older members who had served in the halcyon days of Parnell and had gone through all the squalidness and impotence of the years of the Split.  Had the Party been rightly handled, and led by a man of strong will and inflexible character, it could have been made the mightiest constitutional power for Ireland’s emancipation.  Unfortunately Mr John Redmond was not a strong leader.  He unquestionably possessed many of the attributes of leadership—­a dignified presence, distinguished deportment, a wide knowledge of affairs, a magnificent mastery of the forms and rules of the House of Commons, a noble eloquence and a sincere manner, but he lacked the vital quality of strength of character and energetic resolve.  He was not, as Parnell was, strong enough to impose his will on others if he found it easier to give way himself.  And thus from the very outset of his career as leader of the reunited Party he allowed his conduct to be influenced by others—­very often, let it be said, against his own better judgment.  Mr Redmond had a matchless faculty for stating the case of Ireland in sonorous sentences, but too often he was content to take his marching orders from those powers behind the throne who were the real manipulators of what passed for an Irish policy.  In the shaping of this policy and in the general ordering of affairs, the rank and file of the members had very little say—­they were hopelessly invertebrate and pusillanimous.