Ireland--and perhaps from much that was most important to him. Political
opinion is created in the towns, and he knew the Irish townsfolk, so far
as he could manage it, only through his correspondence, and through
those business visits to Dublin which he made as few as possible.

If his work had lain, where it should by rights have lain, in a
ministerial office in Dublin, all would have been well. As it was, the
deliberate and extreme seclusion of his life in Ireland weakened his
influence. He was far too shrewd not to know this, and far too
unambitious to care. Work he never shrank from. But the daily
solicitations of people with personal grievances to lay before him,
personal interests which they desired him to promote, made a form of
trouble which in his periods of rest from work he refused to undergo.

The same qualities in him were responsible for his persistent refusal to
accept private hospitality where he went on public business. Whether in
Ireland or in Great Britain, he must stay at a hotel, and many were the
magnates of Liberalism whose ruffled feelings it was necessary to smooth
down on this account. He detested being lionized and wanted always, when
the public affair was over, to get away to his own quarters.

The demands on him in England for platform work were portentous. Every
constituency which wanted a meeting on the Home Rule question wanted
Redmond and no other speaker. Of course he could not go to one-twentieth
of the places where he was asked for; and his objection to going was not
the effort involved but the impossibility either of indefinitely
repeating himself or of finding something new to say each time. "If it
was in America," he would say, "I would speak as often as you asked me"
(it was my misfortune to have to do the asking), "because they never
report a speech." The fact is worth noting, for in scores of instances