Westminster--a Party which had lost all faith in itself and which was
a byword and a reproach alike for its helpless inefficiency and its
petty intestine quarrels.

CHAPTER VI

TOWARDS LIGHT AND LEADING

Whilst the slow corruption of the Party had been going on in Ireland,
the cause of Home Rule had been going down to inevitable ruin. The
warnings on which Parnell founded his refusal to be expelled from the
leadership by dictation from England were more than justified in the
event. And later circumstances only too bitterly confirmed it, that
any blind dependence upon the Liberal Party was to be paid for in
disappointment, if not in positive betrayal of Irish interests. A Tory
Party had now come into power with a large majority, and the people
were treated alternately or concurrently to doses of coercion and
proposals initiated with the avowed object of killing Home Rule with
kindness. This had been the declared policy of Mr Arthur Balfour when
his attempt to inaugurate his uncle Lord Salisbury's policy of twenty
years of resolute government had failed, and when, with considerable
constructive foresight, he established the Congested Districts Board
in 1891 as a sort of opposition show--and not too unsuccessful at
that--to the Plan of Campaign and the Home Rule agitation.

With the developments that followed the Irish Party had practically no
connection. They were neither their authors nor instruments, though they
had the sublime audacity in a later generation to claim to be the
legitimate inheritors of all these accomplishments. Mr Dillon had now
arrived at the summit of his Parliamentary ambition--he was the leader
of "the majority" Party, but his success seemed to bring him no comfort,
and certainly discovered no golden vein of statesmanship in his
composition. The quarrels and recriminations of the three sectional
organisations--the National Federation of the Dillonites, the National
League of the Parnellites, and the People's Rights Association of the
Healyites--continued unabated. But beyond the capacity for vulgar abuse
they possessed none other. Parliamentarianism was dying on its legs and
constitutionalism appeared to have received its death-blow. The country
had lost all respect for its "Members," and young and old were sick
unto death of a movement which offered no immediate prospects of action
and no hope for the future. A generation of sceptic