everance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid
controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr.
Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics.
The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace
ruin to British prosperity; the banner of Free Trade offered a splendid
rallying-point for a party which had known fifteen years of dissension
and division. Prudent men thought it would be unsafe, unwise and
unpatriotic to compromise this great national interest by retaining the
old watch-word on which Gladstone had twice fought and twice been
beaten.

It was clear, too, that a Home Rule Bill would provoke a direct conflict
with the House of Lords and would raise that great struggle on not the
most favourable issue. Statesmen like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith
probably believed that a partial measure, an instalment of
self-government, to which some influential sections of the Tory party
would not be unfriendly, might have strong hopes of passing into law.

So it came to pass that in the election of 1906 the Liberal Party came
into power with a majority of unexampled magnitude, but with a
Government pledged, negatively, not to introduce a Home Rule Bill in
that Parliament, but, positively, to attempt an Irish settlement by the
policy of instalments.

In all this lay the seeds of trouble for the Irish leader. Liberals have
never understood that Ireland will not take from them what it would take
from the Tories. It will accept, as a palliative, from the party opposed
to Home Rule what it will not accept from those who have admitted the
justice of the national demand.

II

"For myself," said Redmond in his speech to the Irish Convention in May
1907, "I have always expressed in public and in private my opinion that
no half-way house on this question is possible; but at the same time I
am, or at any rate I try to be, a practical politician. In the lodgment
this idea of instalments had got in the minds of English statesmen I
recognized the fact--and after all in politics the first essential is to
recognize facts--I recognized the fact that in this Parliament we were
not going to get a pure Home Rule Bill offered, and I consented, and I
was absolutely right in consenting, that whatever scheme short of that
was put forward would be considered calmly on its merits."

This meant that during the whole of the year 1906 and a part of 1907 the
proposal