d for a resolution that the question of supporting,
proposing or rejecting amendments should be left to the Irish party.
This was promptly carried by acclamation. All decisions were unanimous
that day.

But before this or any other resolution was put to the Convention,
Redmond asked the multitude there to give, what they gave most
willingly, a welcome to Mr. Gladstone's grandson, who as a young member
of Parliament had just voted for the Bill. The greeting which he
received showed that Ireland had not forgotten what Gladstone's last
years had been.

In the first of his speeches upon the Bill, Sir Edward Grey, a survivor
from Gladstone's Ministry, said, as he threw a glance back over the
struggle from 1886 to 1893:

"Two things stirred me at the time; they stir me still. One is Mr.
Gladstone's intense grip of the fact that there was a national spirit in
Ireland, and the splendour of the effort he made in his last years to
acknowledge and reconcile that spirit. The other is the Irish response
to Mr. Gladstone. It was not the assent of mere tacticians who had
gained an advocate and a point. It was genuine, warm and living feeling,
a response of gratitude and sympathy the same in kind and as living as
his own."

If Redmond's task from 1912 onwards was not lightened by the existence
of any such genuine, warm and living feeling for any of Mr. Asquith's
Ministry, perhaps Ireland is not to blame. There was no intense grip of
any fact in the Government's attitude, and on one cardinal point they
were unstable as water. Sir Edward Carson, in opposing the introduction
of the Bill, had used the words: "What argument is there that you can
raise for giving Home Rule to Ireland that you do not equally raise for
giving Home Rule to that Protestant minority in the north-east
province?" Redmond, following him, made one of his few false moves in
debate. "Is that the proposal? Is that the demand?" he asked. Sir Edward
Carson shot the question at him: "Will you agree to it?" Seldom does the
House see a practised speaker so much embarrassed; Redmond in confusion
passed to another topic. He was soon to be confronted with that same
line of reasoning, pushed not dialectically by an opponent, but as a
step in parliamentary negotiation from the Treasury Bench. Mr.
Churchill, who introduced the Second Reading, made it apparent that the
demonstration in Belfast had not been wasted on him.

"Whatever Ulster's rights may be," he said, "they cann