an older generation came with them, Mr. Biggar, Justin McCarthy
and others. But their leader, though older than most of his followers,
was a young man by parliamentary standards. In 1880 Parnell was only
thirty-three; and within four years more he was as great a power in the
House as Mr. Gladstone. Some few years back I heard Willie Redmond say
in the Members' smoking-room, "Isn't it strange to think that Parnell
would be sixty now if he had lived. I can't imagine him as an old man."
Yet the accent of maturity was on Parnell's leadership; the men whom he
led were essentially young. In 1881, when Redmond entered Parliament,
Mr. Dillon was thirty, Mr. T.P. O'Connor and Mr. Sexton veterans of
thirty-three, Mr. Healy twenty-six. Mr. William O'Brien (who did not
come in until 1883) was of the same year as Mr. Dillon. Redmond was
younger than any of them, being elected at the age of twenty-four. Yet
nobody then thought it surprising that he should be sent in 1882 to
represent the party on a mission to Australia and the United States at a
most difficult time. The Phoenix Park murders had created widespread
indiscriminating anger against all Irish Nationalists throughout the
Empire, and Redmond found it difficult to secure even a hall to speak
in. For support there was sent to him his brother, then a youth of
twenty-one, and feeling ran so strong against the two that the Prime
Minister of New South Wales (Sir Henry Parkes) proposed their expulsion
from the colony. Nevertheless, Redmond made good. "The Irish working-men
stood by me," he said, "and in fact saved the situation." Fifteen
thousand pounds were collected before they left the island continent.

It indicates well the changed conditions to remember that when in 1906
Mr. Hazleton and the late T.M. Kettle were selected to go on a far less
arduous and difficult mission to America, there was much talk about the
astonishing youth of our representatives. Yet both were then older than
John Redmond was in 1882--to say nothing of his brother, who must have
been the most exuberantly youthful spokesman that a serious cause ever
found.

The Redmonds' stay in Australia, which lasted over a year, determined
one important matter for both young men; they found their wives in the
colony whose Prime Minister proposed to expel them. John Redmond married
Miss Joanna Dalton and his brother her near kinswoman, Miss Eleanor
Dalton. Willie Redmond was elected to Parliament in his absence for h