Mr.John Redmond was an orator who selected his words with care, and his appeals to historical analogies were not made haphazard.

When he declared (in a speech in 1901) that, "in its essence, the national movement to-day is the same as it was in the days of Hugh O'Neill, of Owen Roe, of Emmet, or of Wolfe Tone," those names, which would have had but a shadowy significance for a popular audience in England, carried very definite meaning to the ears of Irishmen, whether Nationalist or Unionist.

Mr.Gladstone, in the fervour of his conversion to Home Rule, was fond of allusions to the work of Molyneux and Swift, Flood and Grattan; but these were men whose Irish patriotism never betrayed them into disloyalty to the British Crown or hostility to the British connection.

They were reformers, not rebels.

But it was not with the political ideals of such men that Mr.
Redmond claimed his own to be identical, nor even with that of O'Connell, the apostle of repeal of the Union, but with the aims of men who, animated solely by hatred of England, sought to establish the complete independence of Ireland by force of arms, and in some cases by calling in (like Roger Casement in our own day) the aid of England's foreign enemies.
In the face of appeals like this to the historic imagination of an impressionable people, it is not surprising that by neither Mr.
Redmond's followers nor by his opponents was much account taken of his own personal disapproval of extremes both of means and ends.