Whatever unfortunate circumstance or combination of circumstances gave impulse to “the Board of Erin,” I know not-whether it arose out of a vainglorious purpose to meet the Orangemen with a weapon of import similar to their own, or whether it was merely the love of young people to have association with the occult, I can merely conjecture—­but it was only when Mr Joseph Devlin assumed the leadership of it that it began to acquire an influence in politics which could have no other ending than a disastrous one.

Never before was the cause of Irish liberty associated with sectarianism.  Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and Thomas Davis are regarded as the most inspired apostles and confessors of Irish nationality.  It was a profanation of their memory and an insult to their creed that in the first decade of the twentieth century any man or band of men should have been audacious enough to superimpose upon the structure of the national movement an organisation which in addition to being secret and sectarian was grossly sordid and selfish in its aims.

Stealthily and insidiously “the Board of Erin” got its grip in the United Irish League.  It “bossed,” by establishing a superiority of numbers, the Standing Committee.  Then by “getting hold” of the officers of Divisional Executives and branches it acquired control over the entire machinery of the movement, and thus, in an amazingly short space of time, it secured an ascendancy of a most deadly and menacing character.  Its first overt act of authority was to strangle freedom of speech and to kill land purchase.  What Mr John Dillon had been unable to do through his control of the Party and his collusion with The Freeman’s Journal the Board of Erin most effectively accomplished by an energetic use of boxwood batons and, at a later time, weapons of a more lethal character.

A National Convention had been summoned to pronounce on the Birrell Land Bill of 1909—­a measure which, with incomparable meanness, was designed “to save the Treasury” by ridding it of the honourable obligations imposed by the Wyndham Act of 1903.  This Bill, on the ground that the finance of the Act of 1903 had broken down, proposed to increase the rate of interest on land loans from 2-3/4 to 3-1/4 per cent., and to transform the bonus from a free Imperial grant to a Treasury debt against Ireland.  Apparently it should require no argument to prove that this was a treacherous repeal of an existing treaty, guaranteed by considered legislative enactment, and that it was a proposal which no Irishman with any sense of the duty he owed his country could for one moment entertain.  But it was the unthinkable and the unbelievable thing which happened.  Mr Dillon was determined, at all costs—­and how heavy these costs were, one hundred thousand unpurchased tenants in Ireland to-day have weighty reason to know—­to wreak his spite against the Wyndham Act, which he had over and over again declared was working too smoothly,