Yet there was a marked feeling that the Convention, and the tone which prevailed in the Convention, had done good in the country.  This was admitted by the Grand Master of the Orange Order, Colonel Wallace, in a speech which led to an important illustration of the mutual process of education, for it raised with great frankness the issue of religious differences and alluded specially to the recent Papal decrees over which so much controversy had raged.  The Bishop of Raphoe rose to reply and expounded, as an ex-professor of Canon Law, the true bearing of these documents.  His speech was a masterpiece; its candour and its lucidity commended itself to all hearers, but most of all to the Ulstermen, who applauded at once Lord Oranmore’s comment that the odium theologicum had been replaced by divina caritas; and at a very late stage in our proceedings, Mr. Barrie referred back to this speech of the Bishop’s as one of the things which they would never forget.

The Primate, who in this month of September was one of the hopeful hearts ("My confidence has grown daily,” he said), used words which met with widespread response:  “We can never leave this hall and speak of men whom we have met here as we have spoken of them in the past.”  There was good will in the air—­good will to each other and to the enterprise.  At the close of the proceedings in Cork the Lord Mayor of Belfast moved a vote of thanks to the citizens through their Lord Mayor, and he closed on a note of hope—­anticipating “something in store for Ireland.”

Yet already these anticipations were overcast.  During this week, while all seemed going so well, one of the endless unhappy and preventible things happened.  It was from Redmond that I first heard the news.  One of the Sinn Fein leaders who had been rearrested on suspicion after the amnesty took part in a hunger-strike as a protest against being subjected to the conditions imposed on a convicted felon.  He was forcibly fed and died under the process, owing to heart-failure.  Redmond told me with fury how he had urged again and again on the Chief Secretary the possibility of some such calamity, and had urged that these men should receive the treatment proper in any case to political prisoners, but above all to men who had been neither convicted nor tried.

The result was immediately seen in some hostile demonstrations in Cork, chiefly against Mr. Devlin and Redmond.  But this was only the beginning.  On the following Sunday the body of the dead man, Thomas Ashe, was carried through the streets of Dublin at the head of a vast procession, in which large bodies of Volunteers, openly defying Government’s proclamation, marched in uniform; and he was buried with military honours and volleys fired over his grave.  With all this breach of the law Government dared not interfere.  They had put themselves in the wrong; whether they prevented the demonstration or permitted it, mischief was bound to follow.  A new incitement was given