[Sidenote:  Mitchelstown.]

Mr. Dillon, rising—­pale, high-strung, and nervous—­was a sympathetic sight, and the House was ready to listen to him with the greatest attention.  The Old Man was specially interested.  Whenever nowadays, when his hearing has become somewhat defective, he wants particularly to hear a speech, he has to change his place; usually, as everybody knows, he sits exactly opposite the box on the Speaker’s table.  This evening he went to the last seat on the Treasury Bench—­the seat nearest to the spot from which Mr. Dillon was about to speak, and with his hand to his ear he prepared himself to catch every word that Mr. Dillon was about to utter, and the speech of Mr. Dillon was—­in spite of the halting tones which excitement, unpreparedness, the sense of his responsibility produced—­singularly effective.  The passionate and transparent sincerity of the man—­the sense of all the years of suffering through which he passed—­the recollection of all the risks he has run in the great contemporary Irish Revolution—­all these things spoke in his favour.  Especially was he effective when he described the circumstances under which he had delivered the speech, a passage from which had been incriminated by Mr. Chamberlain.  He had been told just half-an-hour before he rose to speak, of how a poor mother had been torn from her babe; how the two had been taken over a long journey together, and had both been finally lodged in the same cell.  And he asked with a passionate thrill in his voice, that carried away the House with him, whether anybody else under the same circumstances would not have protested in language of violence and vehemence against the cruelty and official brutality which allowed such things to be.  Would not anybody have protested that the officials who were guilty of these things had not to look to reward or promotion from a popular Irish Government.

[Sidenote:  The fatal mistake.]

So far, Mr. Dillon had the House completely with him.  He also scored for a second or two.  He went on to remark that he had been under the influence of the massacre at Mitchelstown; but scarcely had these words proceeded from his lips than a look of dismay passed over the faces of his Irish colleagues.  Close beside him were several men who, like himself, had stood on the platform of the historic square when the police descended upon the meeting, and which ended in the death of three innocent men.  They at once perceived that Mr. Dillon, by some break of memory, had made a mistake in his dates.  The incriminating speech had been delivered in December, 1886, and the Mitchelstown massacre took place in September, 1887.  If the Irish members had not perceived this blunder immediately they would soon have been brought to a sense of coming disaster by the movements on the opposite side.

[Sidenote:  Chamberlain on the spring.]