Mr. William Redmond’s career in that Parliament was soon ended.  In November 1880 he died, and, normally, his son, whose qualifications and ambitions were known, would have succeeded him.  But collision between Government and the Parnellite party was already beginning.  Mr. T.M.  Healy, then Parnell’s secretary, had been arrested for a speech in denunciation of some eviction proceedings.  This was the first arrest of a prominent man under Mr. Forster’s rule as Chief Secretary, and Parnell, with whom in those days the decision rested, decided that Mr. Healy should immediately be put forward for the vacant seat.  In later days he was to remind Mr. Healy how he had done this, “rebuking and restraining the prior right of my friend, Jack Redmond.”  Redmond had not long to wait, however.  Another vacancy occurred in another Wexford seat, the ancient borough of New Ross, and he was returned without opposition at a crucial moment in the parliamentary struggle.

That struggle was not only parliamentary.  From the famine year of 1879 onwards a fierce agitation had begun, whose purpose was to secure the land of Ireland to the people who worked it.  Davitt was to the land what Parnell was to the parliamentary campaign:  but it was Parnell’s genius which fused the two movements.

To meet the growing power of the Land League, Mr. Forster demanded a Coercion Bill, and after long struggles in the Cabinet he prevailed.  Against this Bill it was obvious that all means of parliamentary resistance would be used to the uttermost.

They were still of a primitive simplicity.  In the days before Parnell the House of Commons had carried on its business under a system of rules which worked perfectly well because there was a general disposition in the assembly to get business done.  A beginning of the new order was made when a group of ex-military men attempted to defeat the measure for abolishing purchase of commissions in the Army by a series of dilatory motions.  This, however, was an isolated occurrence.  Any English member who set himself to thwart the desire of the House for a conclusion by using means which the general body considered unfair would have been reduced to quiescence by a demonstration that he was considered a nuisance.  His voice would have been drowned in a buzz of conversation or by less civil interruptions.  This implied, however, a willingness to be influenced by social considerations, and, more than that, a loyalty to the traditions and purposes of the House.  Parnell felt no such willingness and acknowledged no such loyalty.

“His object,” said Redmond in the address already quoted, “was to injure it so long as it refused to listen to the just claims of his country.”  The House, realizing Parnell’s intention, visited upon him and his associates all the penalties by which it was wont to enforce its wishes:  but the penalties had no sting.  All the displays of anger, disapproval, contempt, all the vocabulary of denunciation in debate