This, alas! was already a counsel of perfection for a country so deeply divided in opinion as Nationalist Ireland had come to be.  The old loyalties had gone—­and he felt it.  Ending on a personal note, he referred to his age:  he was over sixty; he had done thirty-five years of work which would have broken down any man less robust in constitution than it had been his luck to be born.  He believed in youth, he said, and would gladly give way to younger men.

“But one thing I will not do while I have breath in my body.  I will not give way to the abuse and calumny and the falsehoods of men whom I have known for long years as the treacherous enemies of Ireland.”

With all his reticence, he was a sensitive man; and for months now he could scarcely take up a newspaper, except his party’s official organ, without finding himself accused of imbecility, of idle vanity, of corrupt bargaining, of every unworthy motive.  Worse than all, he realized the inherent weakness of his position.  He told his hearers at Waterford that the Irish party would not vary its attitude upon the war, but that we should now become a regular and active opposition.  He was far too experienced not to be aware that during a war—­and such a war—­he neither could nor would offer to the Government in power opposition in the sense in which Nationalist Ireland would understand the word.

But he took steps at once for raising the Irish question by a direct vote of censure.  On October 18th he moved: 

“That the system of Government at present maintained in Ireland is inconsistent with the principles for which the Allies are fighting in Europe, and has been mainly responsible for the recent unhappy events and for the present state of feeling in that country.”

His speech avoided all controversial reference to what had preceded the war, but it reviewed with great power the long series of blunders, beginning with the delay in putting the Home Rule Bill on the Statute Book, and ending with the Cabinet’s destruction of the agreement entered into in June.  Now, as the end of all, Dublin Castle, after the Prime Minister’s description of its hopeless breakdown, was set up again with a Unionist Chief Secretary and a Unionist Attorney-General:  with a universal system of martial law in force throughout the country, and with hundreds of interned men in prison on suspicion.  He warned the Government of the inevitable effect upon the flow of recruits for the Irish Divisions; and in a passage which showed how close his attention was to all this matter of recruitment, he pressed the War Office for certain minor concessions to Irish sentiment which would help us to maintain the Division that had so greatly distinguished itself at Guillemont and Ginchy.

But the real pith of his speech was political in the larger sense.  He pressed upon the House the injury which England’s interest was suffering through the alienation of American opinion, and through the reflection of Irish discontent in Australia; he pleaded for the withdrawal of martial law.  Nothing came of the debate, except a speech in which Mr. Lloyd George admitted the “stupidities, which sometimes almost look like malignancy,” that were perpetrated at the beginning of recruiting in Ireland.  The Labour men and a few Liberals voted for our motion.  But as a menace to the Government it was negligible.