alternative, if the
concession were refused, of combined action to enforce the claims of
Ireland at the Peace Conference. There was reason to believe Sinn Fein
would agree to this proposal, and that the Cabinet would have invited
the Dominion Premiers' Conference to intervene in favour of an Irish
settlement, limited only by the formula: "within the Empire."

Mr Dillon blocked the way with the technical objection that the
Conference was called to discuss Conscription alone and that no other
topic must be permitted to go further. Could stupid malignancy or
blind perversity go further?

This fair chance was lost, with so many others. The war came to an end
and a few weeks afterwards the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had so
long played shuttlecock with the national destinies of Ireland, went
to crashing doom and disaster at the polls. The country had found them
out for what they were, and it cast them into that outer darkness from
which, for them, there is no returning.

CHAPTER XXVII

"THE TIMES" AND IRISH SETTLEMENT

No volume, professing to deal however cursorily with the events of the
period, can ignore the profound influence of _The Times_ as a
factor in promoting an Irish settlement. That this powerful organ of
opinion--so long arrayed in deadly hostility to Ireland--should have
in recent years given sympathetic ear to her sufferings and
disabilities is an event of the most tremendous significance, and it
is not improbable that the Irish administration in these troubled
years would have been even more deplorably vicious than it has been
were it not that _The Times_ showed the way to other independent
journals in England in vigilant criticism and fearless exposure of
official wrongdoing.

When, on St Patrick's Day, 1917, Lord Northcliffe spoke at the Irish
Club in London on the urgency of an Irish settlement and on the need
for the economic and industrial development of the country, and when
he proclaimed himself an Irish-born man with "a strong strain of Irish
blood" in him, he did a sounder day's work for Ireland than he
imagined, for he shattered a tradition of evil association which for
generations had linked the name of a great English newspaper with
unrelenting opposition to Ireland's historic claim for independence.
If Ireland had been then approached in the generous spirit of Lord
Northcliffe's speech, if the investigation into Irish self-go