“Despite their aloofness and their attempts to divide the Labourers’ body, the agitation swept throughout the south of Ireland with an intensity which nothing could withstand.  Demonstrations of amazing extent and still more remarkable resoluteness of spirit were addressed by my friends and myself in Charleville and Macroom, County Cork; Kilfinane and Drumcolliher, County Limerick; Tralee and Castle Island, County Kerry; Scariff, County Clare; Goolds Cross, County Tipperary; and Ballycullane, County Wexford; and by the time they were over, the field was fought and won.  One last difficulty remained; but it was a formidable difficulty.  So far from Mr Redmond’s ’almost daily communications with Mr Bryce’ reaching back to the critical days of the problem, we were already in the first days of summer in the session of 1906 when a communication was made to me from a high official quarter that the Irish Government were so deeply immersed in the Irish Council Bill of the following year that they shrank from the labour and the financial difficulties of a Labourers’ Bill in the current session, and an appeal was diplomatically hinted as to whether there was any possibility of slowing down the Labourers’ agitation so as to make a postponement to the following session practicable.  My reply was undiplomatically clear:—­that, if the Government wanted to deprive the Irish Council Bill of all chance of a hearing, they could not take a better means of making the country too hot for themselves than by proposing to fob off the labourers for another year, and that not only would I not, if I could, but could not if I would, moderate their insistence upon immediate redress.

“A short time afterwards, I met Sir Antony MacDonnell in the House of Commons, and he asked ‘What is your labourers’ minimum?’ I gave him a brief outline of the Macroom programme.  ’No rational being could object,’ he said, ‘but what does it mean in hard cash?’ I replied, ‘Roughly, four millions.’  And the great Irishman—­’the worst enemy that ever came to Ireland’ of Mr Dillon’s nightmare hours—­ended the interview with these laconic words:  ’The thing ought to be done and I think can be.’  At the period of the session at which the Bill was introduced, the opposition of even half-a-dozen determined men could have at any stage achieved its ruin.  Thanks, however, to the good feeling the precedent of the Act of 1903 and the admirably conciliatory temper displayed by the labourers themselves in their agitation had engendered, the Bill went triumphantly through and has been crowned with glory in its practical application.  I never pass through any of the southern counties now and feast my eyes on the labourers’ cottages which dot the landscape—­prettier than the farmers’ own homes—­honeysuckles or jasmines generally trailing around the portico—­an acre of potato ground sufficient to be a sempiternal insurance against starvation, stretching out behind—­the pig and the poultry—­perhaps a plot of snowdrops or daffodils for the English market, certainly a bunch of roses in the cheeks of the children clustering about the doorsteps—­without thankfully acknowledging that Cork was right in thinking such conquests were worth a great deal of evil speech from angry politicians.”