For society, Parnell’s party depended on themselves and their countrymen and sympathizers.  But they were in no way to be pitied; they were the best of company for one another.  It was a movement of the young, it had all the strength and audacity of youth, it was a great adventure.  A few men from an older generation came with them, Mr. Biggar, Justin McCarthy and others.  But their leader, though older than most of his followers, was a young man by parliamentary standards.  In 1880 Parnell was only thirty-three; and within four years more he was as great a power in the House as Mr. Gladstone.  Some few years back I heard Willie Redmond say in the Members’ smoking-room, “Isn’t it strange to think that Parnell would be sixty now if he had lived.  I can’t imagine him as an old man.”  Yet the accent of maturity was on Parnell’s leadership; the men whom he led were essentially young.  In 1881, when Redmond entered Parliament, Mr. Dillon was thirty, Mr. T.P.  O’Connor and Mr. Sexton veterans of thirty-three, Mr. Healy twenty-six.  Mr. William O’Brien (who did not come in until 1883) was of the same year as Mr. Dillon.  Redmond was younger than any of them, being elected at the age of twenty-four.  Yet nobody then thought it surprising that he should be sent in 1882 to represent the party on a mission to Australia and the United States at a most difficult time.  The Phoenix Park murders had created widespread indiscriminating anger against all Irish Nationalists throughout the Empire, and Redmond found it difficult to secure even a hall to speak in.  For support there was sent to him his brother, then a youth of twenty-one, and feeling ran so strong against the two that the Prime Minister of New South Wales (Sir Henry Parkes) proposed their expulsion from the colony.  Nevertheless, Redmond made good.  “The Irish working-men stood by me,” he said, “and in fact saved the situation.”  Fifteen thousand pounds were collected before they left the island continent.

It indicates well the changed conditions to remember that when in 1906 Mr. Hazleton and the late T.M.  Kettle were selected to go on a far less arduous and difficult mission to America, there was much talk about the astonishing youth of our representatives.  Yet both were then older than John Redmond was in 1882—­to say nothing of his brother, who must have been the most exuberantly youthful spokesman that a serious cause ever found.

The Redmonds’ stay in Australia, which lasted over a year, determined one important matter for both young men; they found their wives in the colony whose Prime Minister proposed to expel them.  John Redmond married Miss Joanna Dalton and his brother her near kinswoman, Miss Eleanor Dalton.  Willie Redmond was elected to Parliament in his absence for his father’s old seat—­Mr. Healy having vacated Wexford to fight and win a sensational election in county Monaghan.