speeches at semi-public dinners, and all of this strengthened him where
an Irish leader most needs to be strengthened--in the hearts of the
people. The hold which he gained then stood to him during the years
which followed and up to the outbreak of the war. But it could have
been still further strengthened, and if ambition had been a motive force
in him, he would have strengthened it. More than that, if he had
realized his full value to Ireland, he would have felt it his duty to do
so. Modesty, combined with a certain degree of indolence, made him leave
all that contact with the mass of his followers which is necessary to
leadership to be effected through his chief colleagues, Mr. Dillon and
Mr. Devlin--who, through no will of theirs, became rather joint leaders
than lieutenants, so far as Ireland was concerned.

Circumstances helped to emphasize this tendency. His work lay very
greatly in London, Parliament occupied every year a longer and longer
space. The task of platform advocacy all over England was urgent, and in
England Redmond stood out alone. It was little to be wondered at that
when each long deferred recess came he made it a vacation and not a
change of work. The seclusion from direct intercourse with the mass of
his followers which conditions imposed upon him was further accentuated
by his personal tastes and his choice of a dwelling.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the mountain range which
runs along the east coast from outside Dublin through Wicklow into
county Wexford was a country difficult of access and unsubdued. Here in
1803 Emmet found a refuge, and after Emmet's death here Michael Dwyer
still held out: Connemara itself was hardly wilder or less accessible,
till the "military road" was run, little more than a hundred years ago,
from Dublin over the western slopes of Featherbed, past Glencree, and
through Callary Bog, skirting Glendalough and traversing the wild