Home Rule Conference: Home Rulers in Parliament
Above : Picture Of Gladstone
A great conference in Dublin was arranged. In November 1873, the Rotunda,which had witnessed the meeting of the Volunteer Conference in November 1783, and seen it end in disaster and defeat, was now, after ninety years, the scene of another assembly, which, in different ways and by different means, sought, like the earlier one, a remedy for the ills 0f Ireland, but of an Ireland real and national, not merely of the narrow
community for whom mainly, if not exclusively, the men of 1783 had interested themselves. The outcome of this conference was a decision that all the forces of the League should be employed to contest every possible constituency at the next General Election, and that the Members returned should band themselves together in Parliament in a solid body, independent of British Parties and intent only on obtaining, from Conservatives or from Liberals, the object for which they strove.
A General Election came sooner than was expected. In January, 1874, Gladstone dissolved Parliament. The Home Rulers’ success at the polls exceeded anything for which they had dared to hope. Sixty members pledged to their principles were returned. It is true that, even then, not all those who triumphed under the aegis of the League genuinely wished for the success of the cause for which they were supposed to fight. In the bye-elections of the next few years this was still more the case. Many gentlemen, at heart Unionists, considered ” Home Rule ” merely a convenient cry by which the votes of the Irish people might be secured.
In England, naturally, the Home Rule cause found few friends ; in Ireland even, it had many enemies. Besides the Unionists, it had against it the believers in ” Physical Force,” the remnants of the ’48 men and the Fenians, or the inheritors of their traditions. The fortunes of the Home Rulers in Parliament were, during the next few years, not such as could afford much encouragement to their friends. Keeping together and voting on important Irish questions as one man, they were yet constantly defeated by a British majority, cession after session the story was the same. Even the most hopeful began to lose heart. Whether at Ballingarry or at Westminster ; whether with gunpowder or with words the battle was fought, the result for Ireland was, it seemed, the same. Generation after generation of her sons went to combat for her cause, but victory was never theirs.
