registering the decrees of Mr Dillon and his co-conspirators. I do not think, if Mr T.M. Healy had been a member of the Party then, that Mr Dillon would have been able so successfully to entrench himself in power as he did. Mr Healy knew Mr Dillon inside out and he had little respect for his qualities. He knew him to be vain, intractable, small-minded and abnormally ambitious of power. Parnell once said of him: "Dillon is as vain as a peacock and as jealous as a schoolgirl." And when he was not included as a member of the Land Conference I am sure it does him no wrong to say that he made up his mind that somebody should suffer for the affront put upon him. It is ever thus. Even the greatest men are human, with human emotions, feelings, likes and dislikes. And though it is far from my intention to robe Mr Dillon in any garment of greatness, he was, unfortunately, put in a position to do irreparable mischief to great principles, as I conceive, through motives of petty spite. Even if Mr Dillon had stood alone I do not think he would have counted for very much, supported though he was by the suave personality of Mr T.P. O'Connor. But he had won to his side, in the person of Mr Devlin, one of great organising gifts and considerable eloquence, who had now obtained control of the United Irish League and all its machinery and who knew how to manipulate it as no other living person could. Without Mr Devlin's uncanny genius for organisation Mr Dillon's idiosyncrasies could have been easily combated. Mr Dillon's diatribes against "the black-blooded Cromwellians" at a time when the best of the landlord class were steadily veering in the Nationalist direction, I could never understand. Mr Devlin's detestation of the implacable spirit of Ulster Orangemen was a far more comprehensible feeling, but the years have shown only too thoroughly that both passions, and the pursuit of them, have had the most disastrous consequences. Even when Mr Dillon was most powerful in the Party there were many men in it, to my knowledge, who secretly sympathised with the policy of Conciliation but who had not sufficient moral courage to come out in the open in support of it, knowing that if they did they would be marked down for destruction at the next General Election. It is evident that from a Party thus dominated and dragooned, and an organisation which had its resolutions manufactured for it in the League offices in Dublin, no good fruit could come.