whom,
following the example of John Bright, he always bluntly described as
"the rebel party." He knew something of the rebellions in Ireland in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and was under no
illusion as to the design for which arms had been taken up in the past.
He knew that that design had not changed with the passing of
generations, although gentler methods of accomplishing it might
sometimes find favour. Indeed, one Nationalist leader himself took
pains, at a comparatively recent date, to remove any excuse there may
ever have been for doubt on this point. Mr. John Redmond was an orator
who selected his words with care, and his appeals to historical
analogies were not made haphazard. When he declared (in a speech in
1901) that, "in its essence, the national movement to-day is the same as
it was in the days of Hugh O'Neill, of Owen Roe, of Emmet, or of Wolfe
Tone," those names, which would have had but a shadowy significance for
a popular audience in England, carried very definite meaning to the ears
of Irishmen, whether Nationalist or Unionist. Mr. Gladstone, in the
fervour of his conversion to Home Rule, was fond of allusions to the
work of Molyneux and Swift, Flood and Grattan; but these were men whose
Irish patriotism never betrayed them into disloyalty to the British
Crown or hostility to the British connection. They were reformers, not
rebels. But it was not with the political ideals of such men that Mr.
Redmond claimed his own to be identical, nor even with that of
O'Connell, the apostle of repeal of the Union, but with the aims of men
who, animated solely by hatred of England, sought to establish the
complete independence of Ireland by force of arms, and in some cases by
calling in (like Roger Casement in our own day) the aid of England's
foreign enemies.

In the face of appeals like this to the historic imagination of an
impressionable people, it is not surprising that by neither Mr.
Redmond's followers nor by his opponents was much account taken of his
own personal disapproval of extremes both of means and ends. His
opponents in Ulster simply accepted such utterances as confirmation of
what they had known all along from other sources to be the actual facts,
namely, that the Home Rule agitation was "in its essence" a separatist
movement; that its adherents were, as Mr. Redmond himself said on
another occasion, "as much rebels as their fathers were in 1798"; and
that the men of Ulster