his party as a whole was perceptibly weakened. Especially an alienation
began between him and the Catholic hierarchy. It was impossible that the
clergy should be well disposed towards proposals which, as Mr. Healy put
it, would make Cardinal Logue a foreigner in his own cathedral at
Armagh.

Yet upon the whole the shake to Redmond's power was less than might have
been expected--largely, no doubt, because the offer was repelled. Sir
Edward Carson described it as "sentence of death with stay of execution
for six years." With a great advocate's instinct, he fastened on the
point in the Government's proposal which was least defensible.

In my opinion these modifications of the Bill were never adequately
discussed in the meetings of the Irish party. All was done between the
Government and Redmond's inner cabinet, consisting of Redmond himself,
Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin and Mr. T.P. O'Connor. The negotiations were most
delicate and difficult, and above all secrecy is hard to maintain when a
body of over seventy men, each keenly concerned for the view of his
constituents, comes to be consulted. Yet I think it a pity that the
party never thrashed this question out. Once the principle of option was
admitted, a great deal had to be considered. Voting must be a referendum
either to the province as a whole, to the constituencies separately, or
to local units of administration. A referendum by constituencies was as
impossible as one by parishes: for instance, Mr. Devlin's West Belfast,
out of the city's four divisions, would certainly have voted to remain
under the Irish Parliament, and an absurd situation would have resulted.
The choice lay between a vote by counties or by the province as a whole.
In the province, three counties out of nine were as predominantly
Nationalist as any part of Leinster. In two others, Tyrone and
Fermanagh, Nationalists were about 55 per cent of the electorate. But