Thus John Redmond came from an invading strain in which Norman and Celt were already blended; and he grew up in a country thickly settled with men whose ancestors came along with his from across the water.  Till a century ago the barony of Forth retained a dialect of its own which was in effect such English as men spoke before Chaucer began to write; and even to-day in any Wexford fair or market you will see among the strong, well-nourished, prosperous farmers many faces and figures which an artist might easily assimilate to an athletic example of the traditional John Bull.  Redmond himself, hawk-faced and thick-bodied, might have been taken for no bad reincarnation of Raymond Le Gros.  To this extent he was less of a Celt than many of his countrymen; but he was assuredly none the less Irish because he was a Wexfordman.  The county of his birth was the county which had made the greatest resistance to English power in Ireland since Sarsfield and his “Wild Geese” crossed to Flanders.  Born in 1857, he grew up in a country-side full of memories of events then only some sixty years old; he knew and spoke with many men who had been out with pike or fowling-piece in 1798.  Rebel was to him from boyhood up a name of honour; and this was not only a phase of boyish enthusiasm.  In his mature manhood, speaking as leader of the Irish party, he told the House of Commons plainly that in his deliberate judgment Ireland’s situation justified an appeal to arms, and that if rebellion offered a reasonable prospect of gaining freedom for a united Ireland he would counsel rebellion on the instant.

But if he was always and admittedly a potential rebel, no man was ever less a revolutionary.  As much a constitutionalist as Hampden or Washington, he was so by temperament and by inheritance.  The tradition of parliamentary service had been in his family for two generations.  Two years after his birth his great-uncle, John Edward Redmond, from whom he got his baptismal names, was elected unopposed as Liberal member for the borough of Wexford, where his statue stands in the market-place, commemorating good service rendered.  Much of the rich flat land which lies along the railway from Wexford to Rosslare Harbour was reclaimed by this Redmond’s enterprise from tidal slob.  On his death in 1872 the seat passed to his nephew William Archer Redmond, whose two sons were John and William Redmond, with whom this book deals.  Thus the present Major William Archer Redmond, M.P., represents four continuous generations of the same family sent to Westminster among the representatives of Nationalist Ireland.

Not often is a family type so strongly marked as among the men of this stock.  But the portraits show that while the late Major “Willie” Redmond closely resembled his father, in John Redmond and John Redmond’s son there were reproduced the more dominant and massive features of the first of the parliamentary line.