I am sure it does him no wrong to say that he made up his mind that somebody should suffer for the affront put upon him.  It is ever thus.  Even the greatest men are human, with human emotions, feelings, likes and dislikes.  And though it is far from my intention to robe Mr Dillon in any garment of greatness, he was, unfortunately, put in a position to do irreparable mischief to great principles, as I conceive, through motives of petty spite.  Even if Mr Dillon had stood alone I do not think he would have counted for very much, supported though he was by the suave personality of Mr T.P.  O’Connor.  But he had won to his side, in the person of Mr Devlin, one of great organising gifts and considerable eloquence, who had now obtained control of the United Irish League and all its machinery and who knew how to manipulate it as no other living person could.  Without Mr Devlin’s uncanny genius for organisation Mr Dillon’s idiosyncrasies could have been easily combated.  Mr Dillon’s diatribes against “the black-blooded Cromwellians” at a time when the best of the landlord class were steadily veering in the Nationalist direction, I could never understand.  Mr Devlin’s detestation of the implacable spirit of Ulster Orangemen was a far more comprehensible feeling, but the years have shown only too thoroughly that both passions, and the pursuit of them, have had the most disastrous consequences.

Even when Mr Dillon was most powerful in the Party there were many men in it, to my knowledge, who secretly sympathised with the policy of Conciliation but who had not sufficient moral courage to come out in the open in support of it, knowing that if they did they would be marked down for destruction at the next General Election.  It is evident that from a Party thus dominated and dragooned, and an organisation which had its resolutions manufactured for it in the League offices in Dublin, no good fruit could come.

Mr Redmond’s position was pitiful in the extreme.  Neither his judgment nor his sense of statesmanship could approve the departure which Mr Dillon and his accomplices had initiated.  He avowed again and again, publicly to the country and privately in the Party, that he was in entire agreement with Mr O’Brien up to the date of his resignation; and it is as morally certain as anything can be in this world that if he had not crippled his initiative by sanctioning, under his own hand, the announcement of the 24-1/2 years’ purchase terms for his estate, he would never have allowed himself to be associated with what he rather wearily and shamefacedly described as “a short-sighted and unwise policy.”