ughout the
agitation. This, unfortunately, was not the most inexcusable of their
services to the Labourers' cause. When the Land and Labour Association
held their annual Convention, the secretary, who had infringed their
instructions at the Directory meeting, finding himself hopelessly
outnumbered, seceded from the organisation and formed a rival
association of his own; and sad and even shocking though the fact is, it
is beyond dispute that this split in the ranks of the unhappy labourers,
in the very crisis of their cause, was organised with the aid of the
moneys of the National Organisation administered by the men who were at
that very moment deafening the country with their indignation against
dissension-mongers and their zeal for majority rule.

"It was all over again the dog-in-the-manger policy which had already
kept the evicted tenants for years out in the cold. They would neither
stand on a non-contentious platform with myself nor organise a single
Labourers' demonstration of their own. It has been repeatedly stated
by members who were constant attendants at the meetings of the Irish
Party that the subject of the Labourers' grievances was never once
discussed at any meeting of the party until the agitation in Ireland
had first compelled the introduction of Mr Bryce's Bill. Then, indeed,
when the battle was won, and there was only question of the booty, Mr
Redmond made the public boast that he and Mr Dillon "were in almost
daily communications with Mr Bryce upon the subject." The excuse was
as unavailing as his plea that the finally revised terms of sale of
his Wexford estate left him without a penny of profit. What concerned
the country was the first announcement of 24-1/2 years' purchase
authorised under his own hand which had 'given a headline' to every
landlord in the country. In the same way, whatever obsequious
attendance he might dance on Mr Bryce, when the die was cast and the
Bill safe, the ineffaceable facts remain that neither he nor anybody
in his party whom he could influence had stood on a Labour platform,
or touched upon the subject at the party meeting, while the intentions
of the Government were, as we shall see in a moment, undecided in the
extreme, but on the contrary were (it may be hoped unconscious but
none the less indispensable) parties to an organised effort to split
the Labourers' Association asunder while their fate was trembling in
the balance.

"Their war upon the Land and Labour As