send "missions" to America and Australia to collect funds, it was no longer dependent on the popular will, as expressed in terms of material support, and it became the masters of the people instead of their servants. Not that I want for one moment unnecessarily to disparage the personnel of the Party--it was probably the best that Ireland could have got in the circumstances--nor do I seek to diminish its undoubtedly great services to Ireland in the days of Parnell and during the period that it loyally adopted the policy of Conciliation. But what I do deplore is that a few men in the Party--not more than three or four all told--were able, by getting control of "the machine," to destroy the fairest chance that Ireland ever had of gaining a large measure of self-government. Knowing all that happened within the Party in the years of which I am writing, knowing the methods that were employed, rather unscrupulously and with every circumstance of pettiness, to bear down any member who showed the least disposition to exercise legitimately an independent judgment--knowing how the paid organisers of the League were at once dispatched to his constituency to intrigue against him and to work up local enmities, I am not, and never was, surprised at the compelled submission of the body of the members to the decrees of the secret Cabinet who controlled policy and directed affairs with an absolute autocracy that few dared question. One member more courageous than his fellows, Mr Thomas O'Donnell, B.L., did come upon the platform with Mr Wm. O'Brien at Tralee, in his own constituency and had the manliness to declare in favour of the policy of Conciliation, but the tragic confession was wrung from him: "I know I shall suffer for it." And he did!