MR. O'BRIEN IN THE TENTS OF KEDAR.* WHATEVER may be

the opinions held of other portions of Mr. O'Brien's political career, his name will always be • An Olive Branch in Ireland and its History. By William O'Brien, M.P. London: Macmillan and Co. (10s. net.]

honourably associated with the Irish Landlords' Conference and with the passing of Mr. Wyndham's Land Purchase Act. In An Olive Branch in Ireland he has written the history of this, the most serious and the most promising of the many attempts that have been made to dispose of the problem which has so long lain at tbe root of the Irish difficulty. It has not, it is true, had all the results which were justly expected from it; but this partial failure is due to unexpected changes.

in the financial position in England, still more to the refusal of the present Government to take over the policy of their predecessors, and most of all to Mr.Sedmond's sudden change of front in reference to the Act. Mr. O'Brien gives us a very detailed narrative of these events,—so detailed, indeed, that it becomes at times somewhat hard to follow. The appear- ances and reappearances of Mr. Redmond, now on one side and now on the other, add to this confusion. He is alternately Mr. O'Brien's best friend and his worst enemy,—his choice of parts being seemingly' determined by the presence or absence of Mr. Dillon.

We shall not follow Mr. O'Brien in his choice of a starting- point. "The Parnell Tragedy" is a landmark in the history of the Home-rule controversy, but its solitary connexion with land purchase is the fact that it sent into a retirement which proved final the most determined opponent of all con- ciliatory measures. The history of the later movement really began with Captain Shawe-Taylor's remarkable letter to the Irish Press in September, 1902. With no special claims to. be listened to, and, so far as appears, without consultation with any one, the writer proposed that certain representatives of the two main divisions of Irish opinion, among whom were included the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. Redmond, the O'Conor Don, and Mr. O'Brien, should meet in conference at Dublin to remodel the land system of Ireland. The letter shows no trace of official influence ; -but within two days of its publication Mr. Wyndham gave it unexpected importance by an announce- ment that any Conference would be "a step in the right direction," though he declined to exproas any opinion on the opportuneness of the moment chosen by Captain Shawe-Taylor or on the persons invited to attend it. In the first instance the Conference met with no favour from the landlords. The Duke of Abercorn and the O'Conor Don declined to attend it, and the Landowners' Convention rejected the proposal by 77 votes to 14. As the Nationalists were thus left masters of the field, it seemed that the Conference would have the fatal flaw of

representing only one party. Happily some of the landlords were wiser. A Conciliation Committee was formed, a -vote was taken which showed 1,128 landlords in favour of a Conference and 578 against it, and in less than four months after the appearance of Captain Shawe-Taylor's letter the

Conference actually met. The landlords were represented by Lord Dunraven, Lord Mayo, Mr. Hutcheson Poe, and Mr.

Nugent Everard; the tenants by Mr. Redmond, Mr. O'Brien, Mr. T. W. Russell, and Mr. T. C. Harrington, the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Lord Dunraven was unanimously elected chair- man. The real point which the Conference had to determine- was how the gulf between the tenants' and the landlords' interests was to be bridged over. Five years earlier Mr. O'Brien had suggested a method by which this end might be- reached. The tenants were willing to pay the purchase money in annual instalments calculated on the third judicial rents.

Thelandlords could afford to sell at a price calculated on the second judicial rents. Between these two sums there was a difference of some 20 per cent., and the main point which the- Conference had to settle was from what source the money represented by this difference was to come. Had the Con- ference been the only party concerned, the answer it gave to. this question would have been of no value. The only quarter from which the 20 per cent. could possibly be made good was. the State, and only the Cabinet could make an offer which would bind the State. But the Cabinet had already given an. earnest of its readiness to consider a measure of this kind in the appointment of Sir Antony MacDonnell to the Irish:

Under-Secretaryship. Mr. O'Brien gives a characteristically- glowing description of the new Under-Secretary as he saw- him at an informal luncheon at a London restaurant. The- head was "the head of a Bismarck, but of a Bismarck whose heart was; softer than his head. The voice was that of one who never- required to raise it to be effectively heard, and there was once in; a way the slight peremptory gesture which was not accustomed to. be disobeyed. Even in two or three not lengthy interviews it was.

not difficult to see traces of the imperious temper of one who had ruled over more settled millions than the dynasty of the Moguls, but the temper quite manifestly of a man with whom the happiness of his forty millions was the uppermost thought."

At this time Sir Antony was not yet the Under-Secretary ; but the offer had been made to him, and probably it was in consequence of this luncheon that he decided to accept it.

Mr. O'Brien expounded his plan of a State bonus which should bring up the terms which the tenants were willing to offer to a level with the figure- which the landlords could afford to accept. "With the tranquil decisiveness of one

accustomed to proceed to rapid judgment and as rapid action

in great affairs," Sir Antony at once said : "That would mean a free gift of ten or twelve millions. That ought not to be impossible." Shortly afterwards the news of his appoint- ment showed that he had come to Ireland prepared to welcome an arrangement on this basis. The Conference held six meetings, in the course of which the draft Report proposed by

the chairman was subjected to severe and successful criticism. In its first form the Report "did not contemplate the entire abolition of landlordism at all," but only proposed to recom- mend "a wide extension of the system of occupying owner- ship " ; in its final form it declared that the only satisfactory settlement of the land question was the substitution of an occupying proprietary in lieu of the existing system of dual ownership. Lord Duuraven's draft said nothing about a State bonus; the Report as amended recognised a "reason- able difference between the sum advanced by the State and [that] ultimately repaid to it," thus affirming the principle of a bonus, the amount of which was defined as equal to a reduction of not less than 15 per cent. or more than 25 per cent, on second-term rents. The whole proceeding reflects very great honour on Lord Dunraven and his brother- landlords. They put the substance before the shadow, the end of a land war before the recognition of any special claim of their own.

No doubt the two parties took different views of the effect which the Report of the Conference, or rather the Act of Parliament in which that Report was ultimately embodied, would have upon Irish politics. Both recognised that it would take the land question out of the way. Both believed that this would mean a contented, and therefore a peaceful, Ireland. But Mr. O'Brien and his friends saw in this change the removal of the chief obstacle to the conversion of Englishmen to Home-rule, while the landlords hoped that this conversion would be rendered unnecessary by Home-rule ceasing to be an object of desire to Irishmen. There was nothing in this to hinder them from working heartily together so long as they were working for the same object. Mr. Wyndham's Act was as popular among Nationalists of Mr. O'Brien's type as amongst Unionists of the type of Lord Dunra.ven. Unfor- tunately, Mr. O'Brien's type was the type of only a section of the Irish Party. While the Conference lasted, indeed, it included the Nationalist leaders ; bat before long Mr.

Redmond was overawed by his political colleagues, and in the end became the declared enemy of his own work. The first sign of what was soon to become a formidable, and by the help of the English Liberals a successful, warfare

was given on the day when the Report of the Conference was made public. On the previous evening Mr. O'Brien and a contributor to the Freeman who had for years been in charge of the land question dined together, and discussed the Report "in a spirit of joyous hopefulness." The journalist "left at a late hour that evening to write his leading article on the subject. On reaching the Freeman office he was informed

without a word of explanation that he need not trouble him- self about it,—that the leading article en the Land Conference Report was already written." The change was due to Mr. Sexton, who had just taken the chief control of the paper. In his denunciation of the Conference proposals he had the support of Mr. Davitt from the first, and of Mr. Dillon after his return from America. Their enmity became still more bitter when the introduction of Mr. Wyndham's Bill enabled them to make the Government, and not their own leader, the object of attack. If what Mr. O'Brien justly calls "the most colossal scheme of Imperial expenditure for a benign social object to be found in the history of any country" had been another Coercion Act, it could hardly have been more fiercely opposed by one section of the Nationalists. In the end Mr. Redmond's courage failed him, either from dislike to be opposed to Mr. Dillon, or

from calculation that the irreconcilable section of the Irish Party was stronger in the country. He reversed his opinion of Mr. Wyndham's Act, and came to see in it all the mischiefs that the Freeman had for months attributed to it The particulars of this mental revolution may be followed in Mr. O'Brien's volume. By this change Mr. Redmond did as much to make the results of the settlement worthless as at an earlier stage he had done to make its acceptance possible. He helped to wreck the finance of the Act by preventing the saving in the cost of the Irish Constabulary which would have been effected if Ireland had been quiet. He helped to wreck its main principle by his support of the Land Purchase Act of 1909, which has "for all practical purposes brought Land Purchase to a dead stop." Certainly facts go seine way to establish Mr. O'Brien's charge that, "as at every other critical moment of his ill-starred rule in Ireland, Mr. Birrell took hie orders from Mr. Dillon." In another place, however, Mr. O'Brien suggests a different explanation of the Chief Secre- tary's action. May it not have been influenced by the Liberals who, "when the antagonistic doctrines of land nationalisation began to permeate their party, and when it seemed a more popular Liberal policy to devote the 2160,000,000 a year of Imperial expenditure to any purpose rather than completing the work of land purchase in Ireland," saw in the ruin of Mr. Wyndham's work a happy escape from an inconvenient obligation?

There is much that is exceedingly interesting in Mr. O'Brien's account of the "Board of Erin" and of the Molly Maguire terrorism which it engineered. But as every sentence of this is certain to be challenged, and we have not the means of judging between the conflicting statements, we prefer to recommend our readers to study it for themselves.