When the Liberals came back to power with an irresistible majority Ireland rang from end to end with glad promises of a great, a glorious and a golden future. The Liberals had the reins of government in their hands, and the tears were going to be wiped from the face of dark Rosaleen. Never again was she to know the bitterness of sorrow or that hope of freedom so long deferred which maketh the heart sick. Mr T.P. O'Connor wrote to his American news agency that Home Rule was coming at a "not far distant date." It was a fair hope, but the men who gambled on it did not take the House of Lords sufficiently into their calculations. And they forgot also that Home Rule was not a concrete and definite issue before the country at the General Election. The Liberal Party in 1906 had no Home Rule mandate. Its leaders were avowedly in favour of what was known as "the step-by-step" programme. This policy was less than Lord Dunraven's scheme of Devolution, but because it was the Liberal plan it came in for no stern denunciations from either Mr Dillon or Mr T.P. O'Connor. Even so staunch a Home Ruler as Mr John Morley insisted that Mr Redmond's Home Rule Amendment to the Address should contain this important addendum: "subject to the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament." The men who shouted in Ireland: "No compromise," who were clamant in their demand that there" should be no hauling down of the flag," and who asked the country to go "back to the old methods" (though they made it clear they were not going to lead them if they did), showed no disinclination to have their own private negotiations with the Liberal leaders on a much narrower programme. Mr T.P. O'Connor, in his _Life of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, M.P._, tells us exactly what happened, in the following words:-- "The Irish Nationalists had already become restive, for, while not openly repudiating Home Rule as an ultimate solution, several of the friends and adherents of Lord Rosebery among the leaders of the Liberal Party had proclaimed that they would not only not support, but would resist any attempt to introduce a Home Rule measure in a Parliament that was about to be elected. It was under these circumstances that I had an interview of any length with Campbell-Bannerman for the last time. He invited a friend and me to breakfast with him.... This exchange of views was brief, for there was complete agreement as to both policy and tactics.... It was shortly after this that he made his historic speech in Stirling. That was the speech in which he laid down the policy that while Ireland might not expect to get at once a measure of complete Home Rule, any measure brought in should be consistent with and leading up to a larger policy. Such a declaration was all that the Irish Nationalist Party could have expected at that moment and it enabled them to give their full support at the elections to the Liberal Party."