“It was all over again the dog-in-the-manger policy which had already kept the evicted tenants for years out in the cold.  They would neither stand on a non-contentious platform with myself nor organise a single Labourers’ demonstration of their own.  It has been repeatedly stated by members who were constant attendants at the meetings of the Irish Party that the subject of the Labourers’ grievances was never once discussed at any meeting of the party until the agitation in Ireland had first compelled the introduction of Mr Bryce’s Bill.  Then, indeed, when the battle was won, and there was only question of the booty, Mr Redmond made the public boast that he and Mr Dillon “were in almost daily communications with Mr Bryce upon the subject.”  The excuse was as unavailing as his plea that the finally revised terms of sale of his Wexford estate left him without a penny of profit.  What concerned the country was the first announcement of 24-1/2 years’ purchase authorised under his own hand which had ‘given a headline’ to every landlord in the country.  In the same way, whatever obsequious attendance he might dance on Mr Bryce, when the die was cast and the Bill safe, the ineffaceable facts remain that neither he nor anybody in his party whom he could influence had stood on a Labour platform, or touched upon the subject at the party meeting, while the intentions of the Government were, as we shall see in a moment, undecided in the extreme, but on the contrary were (it may be hoped unconscious but none the less indispensable) parties to an organised effort to split the Labourers’ Association asunder while their fate was trembling in the balance.

“Their war upon the Land and Labour Association was all the more wanton, because Mr Dillon’s persuasion, which gave rise to it that the Association had been brigaded into my secret service for some nefarious purpose of my own, was as absurdly astray as all the rest of his troubled dreams of my Machiavellian ambitions.  To avoid giving any pretext for such a suspicion, I declined to accept any office or honour or even to become a member of the Land and Labour Association, attended no meeting to which Mr Redmond and Mr Dillon were not invited as well as I; and beyond my speeches at those meetings, never in the remotest degree interfered in the business or counsels of the Association.  A number of men on the governing council of the Association were to my knowledge, and continued to be, sympathisers with my critics.  Beyond the fact that their president, Mr Sheehan, M.P., happened to be the most successful practiser of my Land Purchase plans in the county of Cork, as well as by far the ablest advocate the Labourers’ agitation had called into action, I know of no shadow of excuse for the extraordinary folly which led responsible Irishmen, with the cry of ‘Unity’ on their lips, not only to decline to meet me on a common platform, but to make tens of thousands of absolutely unoffending labourers the victims of their differences with me.