authority in the manner
of an independent and resolute leader.

I am at pains to set forth these matters to justify the living and, in
some measure, to absolve the dead. I want to place the responsibility
for grievous failures and criminal blunders on the right shoulders. I
seek to make it plain how the country was bamboozled and betrayed by
Party machinations such as have not had their parallel in any other
period of Irish history. I state nothing in malice or for any ulterior
motive, since I have none. But I think it just and right that the
chief events of the past twenty years should be set forth in their
true character so that impartial inquirers may know to what causes can
be traced the overwhelming tragedies of recent times.

CHAPTER XIII

A TALE OF BAD LEADERSHIP AND BAD FAITH

It became a habit of the Irish Party, in its more decadent days, to
spout out long litanies of its achievements and to claim credit, as a
sort of hereditament no doubt, for the reforms won under the
leadership of Parnell. It was, when one comes to analyse it, a sorry
method of appealing for public confidence--a sort of apology for
present failures on the score of past successes. It was as if they
said: "We may not be doing very well now, but think of what we did and
trust us." And the time actually arrived when "Trust us" was the
leading watchword of Mr Redmond and his Party. How little they
deserved that trust in regard to some important concerns I will
proceed to explain. I have shown how they dished Devolution and drove
Mr Wyndham from office when he was feeling his way towards the
concession of Home Rule--or equivalent proposals under another name;
and how they thus destroyed in their generation the last hope of a
settlement by Consent of the Irish Question--although a settlement
along these lines was what Gladstone most desired. Writing to Mr
Balfour, so long ago as 20th December 1885, he thus expressed himself:

"On reflection I think what I said to you in our conversation at Eaton
may have amounted to the conveyance of a hope that the Government
would take a strong and early decision on the Irish Question. This
being so, I wish, under the very peculiar circumstances of the case,
to go a step further and say that I think it will be a public calamity
if this great subject should fall into the lines of Party conflict. I
feel sure that the question can only be dealt with by