Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 16, 26 April 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.) CHAPTER XXL— (Continued.) The Papal Rescript of which we heard the first at the Bishop’s dinner-table was a. considerable addition to the difficulties of overcoming a powerful Coercion Government ; but the blow would have been comparatively slight but for another which befell us a. few days after its publication. It was no less than a speech of the Irish Leader at the Eighty Club in London dissociating himself in harsh, and even bitter, terms from the Plan of Campaign, and bringing the most unexpected aid and comfort to its enemies in Ireland, in Britain, and in Rome.* That a fulmination from Rome, which was obviously the result of English machinations at the Vatican and of secret consultations in the houses of Irish landlords, should be reinforced by another and a harsher one from the Irish Leader, at a moment when some of the most prominent of his colleagues and thousands of his countrymen were wrestling for their lives against the might of England was a 'phenomenon so painful that even the faintest show of disloyalty among Parnell’s lieutenants at the moment might have led to dangerous manifestations of Irish feeling. Happily, his long absence from Ireland had diminished the importance of a rare and obviously ill-informed interference in the home struggle, and both crises were surmounted with signal dignity, self-restraint, and moderation by the Irish people. For the first time (and the last time) ,in my life it must be owned I was really angry with Parnell and lost not a moment in telling him so 'in London. It was easy to see that the Eighty Club speech was one of the mistakes engendered by-his growing isolation from his own colleagues and from free English Liberal opinion as well. Also, there was a pallor upon his worn cheeks which told its own tale. He discussed the situation with the charm and tolerance which were never missing from his private consultations. Only once was his brow at all clouded, when he hinted that his speech was not at all aimed at me —a suspicion which, indeed, had never for' a moment crossed my mind but at two of our colleagues whom he now seldom named without a certain suspiciousness; but he did not return to the subject after I had pointed out that' one of the two had not as much to do with the real guidance of the Plan of Campaign struggle as public appearances might suggest and that the other had never participated in it at all save as a friendly outsider, and might with a little less unkindness on Parnell’s own part have been easily preserved, as a friendone whom nature formed of soft and impressionable material on the emotional side as well as of the finest steel as a Parliamentary swordsman. I once more recalled that if we had not consulted him in detail concerning the Plan of Campaign it was because we took it for granted that, as in the case of the resistance to the three years’ Coercion Act of Lord Spencer, he would prefer, as the supreme power in the background, to hold himself aloof from responsibility for somewhat desperate courses, while absolutely' free, so far as we were concerned, either to disown us if we were beaten or to utilise for the country any advantage these desperate courses might be the means

of achieving that in the only definite advice he had offered viz., as to restricting the area of the Plan of Campaign —we had conformed rigidly to our undertaking with him even at the expense of doubling the difficulties of winning within a space so circumscribed; and that his original apprehension that British opinion might be estranged could scarcely with any reason survive now, when the Plan of Campaign struggle in Ireland and its protagonists were the supreme attractions of Liberal platforms.* I was more profoundly convinced now than ever (I told him) that he was entitled to say of Ireland what Pitt had once said of England: “I can save the country and no other man can.” (“That,” Parnell interjected with a. smile, “was a rather cheeky observation on Pitt’s part,” adding with a grave face: “but there are times when there may be some foundations of truth in such sayings.”) He had only to say the word, and the Plan of Campaign would cease from troubling; but he must take the responsibility of making up his mind one way or the other. If his speech meant any relaxation of our activities at this stage, it would mean the ruin of the evicted tenants who had trusted us, and I had made up my mind that, rather than change our attitude one jot, I must give up my connection with United Ireland and leave him free to give its policy any new direction he chose. “Good gracious, what an idea was his comment. “My dear O’Brien, so far from thinking of anything like that, I have a proposal to make to you which will make you a bigger man in the country than even United Ireland can make you.” He then mentioned that he had been authorised by Mrs. Gray to offer me the Managing Editorship of the Freeman’s Journal. Her husband. Edmund Dwyer Gray, who had died a few months before, was one of the three most capable Irishmen of his generation. Widely though his early death was mourned, the country hardly half realised all it had lost. Parnell urged in more than generous terras that, in the era of national freedom which must come in a year or two, the control of that great journal would bring with it an influence in the country’s future which no weekly paper, however powerful, could permanently ensure. Under other circumstances, was my reply, the offer would have been an irresistible one; but, having regard to the vastness of the property at stake, it would he criminal to run the extreme risks of suppression which United Ireland had to take at every publication, and, until the Campaign estates were safe, it would not be.possible for me to abate these risks or lower the fighting flag of any paper under my direction.

* The banquet in his honor, it which the speech was delivered, was marked by some characteristic traits of Parnell. The company at the National Liberal Club, including Earl Spencer, who was to preside, and most of the sommites of the Liberal Party, were kept cooling their heels for an unconscionable time after the hour named for the dinner. When they. were beginning to doubt whether the guest would arrive at all. Parnell sailed in with superb ease, graciously bestowing his bows among the indignant great people, without the smallest semblance of a consciousness that anything unusual had been happening. It is curious to note that his speech created more dismay among his hosts of the Eighty Club than it did in Ireland.

* Perhaps the most picturesque of my experiences in the ■'Union of Hearts” days was a. miners’ gala in the midst of the Welsh mountains at Blaenau Festiniog, where T ot 4-1« "I? 111 ii, _ll i_ _ __ o I*

I. attended with Air. Tom Ellis, the all-too-soon forgotten “Parnell of Wales,” to address his constituents. The enthusiasm of these ten or fifteen thousand brother Celts of the mountains had something of .the mysterious thrill of wizardry. They cheered the Irish Rebel’s speech perhaps even more ardently than if the most of them understood a word of English, and with their wondrous gift of pennillion singing, the entire multitude sang “God Save Ireland” in Welsh in a roar of measured harmony of which I never heard the like at home. But the white stone with which the evening is marked in my memory was my first meeting with Mr. Lloyd George. He was then a practising solicitor in the neighboring town of Carnarvon and was in training as a candidate for the Burghs at the next election. Even then a quite manifest arriviste, the flowing yellowish hair of a poet, a small man, yet with the square shoulders of one who could set his back to the wall, a certain calculating keenness of an attorney in growing practice, but above all an eye of marvellous brightness which threw all other features into the background, an eye flashing with poetry or Personal magnetism or, it might be, with a business-like attention to the future—in any case, already a. man of mark whose speech in English was not specially remarkable, but whose speech in Welsh threw his Celtic listeners into raptures in which, I am afraid, the honest plainness of the modest “Parnell of Wales” was rather forgotten. (To be continued.)