t man was William O'Brien. Let me say at once that
in those days I had no attachments and no personal predilections. John
Redmond, William O'Brien and John Dillon were all, as we say in
Ireland, "one and the same to me." If anything, because of my
Parnellite proclivities, I rather leaned to Mr Redmond's side, and his
chairmanship of the Party had certainly my most loyal adherence.
Otherwise I was positively indifferent to personalities, and to a
great extent also to policies, since I was in the Party for one
purpose, and one alone, of pushing the labourers' claims upon the
notice of the leaders and of ventilating their grievances in the House
of Commons whenever occasion offered. Furthermore, I do not think I
ever spoke to Mr O'Brien until after the Cork election in 1904, when,
convinced of the rectitude of his policy and principles, I stood upon
his platform to give such humble support as I could to the cause he
advocated, and thereafter, I am proud to say, never once turned aside,
either in thought or action, from the thorny and difficult path I had
chosen to travel. I take no credit to myself for having taken my stand
on behalf of Mr O'Brien's policy. I knew him in all essential things,
both then and thereafter, to be absolutely in the right. I was aware
that, had he so minded, in 1903, when he was easily the most powerful
man in the Party and the most popular in Ireland, he could have
smashed at one onslaught the conspiracy of "the determined
campaigners" and driven its authors to a well-deserved doom. But the
mistake he made then, as mistake I believe it to be, was that he left
the field to those men, who had no alternative policy of their own to
offer to the country, and who, instead of consolidating the national
organisation for the assertion of Irish right, consolidated it rather
in the interests of their own power and personal position. Thus it
happened that a movement conceived and intended as the adequate
expression of the people's will became, in the course of a short
twelve months, everywhere outside of Munster, a mere machine for
registering the decrees of Mr Dillon and his co-conspirators.

I do not think, if Mr T.M. Healy had been a member of the Party then,
that Mr Dillon would have been able so successfully to entrench
himself in power as he did. Mr Healy knew Mr Dillon inside out and he
had little respect for his qualities. He knew him to be vain,
intractable, small-minded and abnormally ambitious of