Sinn Fein was at the time to all outward seeming an insignificant and discredited party with an impossible programme. It still published a small weekly paper with no great circulation. It did not agree with the parliamentarians: it had a standing feud with the Labour Party: it gave a dignified and pontifical blessing to the Volunteers without committing itself to their whole programme. Its only electioneering venture, outside municipal politics, had been a disastrous failure: it had won a few seats on the Dublin City Council: it had tried and failed to run a daily paper. When all Nationalist Ireland was waiting for Home Rule it declared Home Rule to be a thing of naught. To the buoyant confidence of the Parliamentary Party it opposed a cynical distrust of their aims and methods, a constant incredulity of their ultimate success. When the Party pointed to what it had done and to what it was about to do Sinn Fein reminded the country that the very existence of a Parliamentary Party was an acknowledgment of the Act of Union. When the Liberal Government was engaged in an embittered and apparently final struggle for supremacy with the Tory Party in the interests of Ireland, Sinn Fein professed entire disbelief in its sincerity; it asserted that the Liberals really loved the Tories very much better than they loved the Irish. With a querulous and monotonous insistence it preached distrust of all English parties and even of the English nation, towards whom it displayed a hostility that seemed almost to amount to a monomania. To Irish Labour this indiscriminating attitude seemed insensate bigotry: to the Irish people as a whole it seemed incomprehensible that a Nationalist Party should regard the Liberals as enemies and the Ulster Volunteers as brothers in arms. Sinn Fein never seemed less certain of a future in Ireland than when events were preparing to make Ireland Sinn Fein.