When it became known that Sir Antony MacDonnell, then Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, had, in consultation with Lord Dunraven, drafted a scheme for transferring parts of Irish administration to a purely Irish authority, a situation rapidly defined itself in which Ulster broke away from the more liberal elements in Irish Unionism.  The Ulster group demanded and obtained the resignation of Mr. George Wyndham; they demanded also the dismissal of the Under-Secretary.  But Sir Antony MacDonnell was not of a resigning temper; he had not acted without authority, and he was defended zealously by the Irish members.  The section of Liberal opinion which adhered rather to Lord Rosebery than to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman probably drew the conclusion that the Irish party were prepared at least to tolerate the policy of approaching Home Rule step by step; and beyond doubt they were impressed by the prestige of Sir Antony MacDonnell’s record and personality.  The son of a small Irish Catholic landlord, educated at the Galway College of the Queen’s University, he had entered the Indian Civil Service and in it risen to the highest point of power.  The recommendation that he should be brought home to assist in the Government of Ireland had come from Lord Lansdowne, then Governor-General of India, who knew that the famous administrator of the Punjab was a Catholic Irishman of Nationalist sympathies.  He had been accepted by Mr. Wyndham, his official chief, “rather as a colleague than as a subordinate.”  Officially and publicly, the credit for the Land Act of 1903 went to the Chief Secretary, and Mr. Wyndham deserves much of it.  But no one who knew the two men could have doubted that in the shaping of a measure involving so wide a range of detail, the leading part must have been taken by the Irish Civil Servant who in India had acquired most of his fame from a sweeping measure of land reform.

Proposals to alter the method and conduct of Irish administration before touching the parliamentary power to legislate and to tax came with extraordinary weight in coming from such a man; and the history of the previous Home Rule Bills was not encouraging to anyone, especially to those who had been members of Mr. Gladstone’s two last administrations.  From the time of the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question had brought to Liberals nothing but embarrassment and embitterment.  The enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid controversies of the “split.”  Moreover, now, by the action of Mr. Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics.  The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace ruin to British prosperity; the banner of Free Trade offered a splendid rallying-point for a party which had known fifteen years of dissension and division.  Prudent men thought it would be unsafe, unwise and unpatriotic to compromise this great national interest by retaining the old watch-word on which Gladstone had twice fought and twice been beaten.