John Edward Redmond is one of the leading men in the House of Commons just now. He is one of the very few really eloquent speakers of whom the House can boast at the present time. His eloquence is, indeed, of a kind but rarely heard in either House of Parliament during recent years. The ordinary style of debate in the House of Commons is becoming more and more of the merely conversational order, and even when the speaker is very much in earnest, even when he is carried away by the fervor of debate, his emotion is apt to express itself rather in an elevation of the voice than in an exaltation of the style. Among members of the House who may be still regarded as having a career before them I do not think there are more than three or four who are capable of making a really eloquent speech—a speech which is worth hearing for its style and its language as well as for its information and its argument. John Redmond is one of these gifted few; Lloyd-George is another. I have heard some critics depreciate John Redmond's eloquence on the ground that it is rather old-fashioned. If it be old-fashioned to express one's meaning in polished and well-balanced sentences, in brilliant phrasing, and with melodious utterance, then I have to admit that John Redmond is not, in his style of eloquence, quite up to the present fashion, and I can only say that it is so much the worse for the present fashion. It is quite certain that Redmond is accepted by the House of Commons in general as one of its most eloquent speakers and one of its ablest party leaders.

Redmond has already been some twenty years in the House of Commons. He was a very young man when first chosen to represent an Irish constituency in the House. I have noticed that our biographical dictionaries of contemporary life do not agree as to the date of Redmond's birth. Some of the books set him down as born in 1851, while others give the year of his birth as 1856. I think I have good reason for knowing that the latter date is the correct one. Perhaps it ought to bring a sense of gratification to a public man when a dispute arises as to the date of his birth. It may give him a complacent reminder of the fact that certain cities disputed as to Homer's birthplace.

John Redmond comes of a good family, and his father was for a long time a member of the House of Commons. I can remember the elder Redmond very well, and he was a man of the most courteous bearing and polished manners, a man of education and capacity, who, whenever he spoke in debate, spoke well and to the point, and was highly esteemed by all parties in the House. John Redmond was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, studied for the law and was called to the bar, but did not practice in the profession. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1881, and became a member of that National party which had been formed not long before under the guidance of Charles Stewart Parnell. From the time when he first took part in a Parliamentary debate it was evident that John Redmond had inherited his father's graceful manner of speaking, and it was soon discovered that he possessed a faculty of genuine eloquence which had not been displayed by the elder Redmond. John Redmond had and still has a voice of remarkable strength, volume, and variety of intonation, and he was soon afforded ample opportunity of testing his capacity for public speech. It was a great part of Parnell's policy that there should be a powerful Home Rule organization extending itself over all parts of Great Britain, founding institutions in all the principal cities and towns, and addressing audiences indoors and out on the subject of Ireland's demand for domestic self-government. John Redmond soon became one of the most effective organizers of this new movement and one of the most powerful pleaders of the cause on public platforms. The first time I ever heard him make a speech in public was at a great open-air meeting held in Hyde Park. He had to address a vast crowd, and I felt naturally anxious to know what his success might be under such trying conditions for a young speaker. He had then but a slender frame, and his somewhat delicately molded features did not suggest the idea of great lung-power. After his first sentence I felt no further doubt as to his physical capacity. He had a magnificent voice, clear, resonant, and thrilling, which made itself heard all over the crowd without the slightest apparent effort on the part of the speaker. I could not help being struck at the time by the seeming contrast between the boyish, delicate figure and the easy strength of the resonant voice.

During his earlier sessions in the House of Commons Redmond did not speak very often, but when he did speak he made it clear that he had at his command a gift of genuine eloquence. He held office as one of the whips of the Irish National party—that is to say, as one of the chosen officials whose duty it is to look after the arrangements of the party, to see that its members are always in their places at the right time, to settle as to the speakers who are to take part in each debate, and to enter into any necessary communications with the whips of the other parties in the House. Redmond was a man admirably suited for such work. He had had an excellent education; he had the polished manners of good society; he belonged to what I may call the country gentleman order, and could ride to hounds with a horsemanship which must have won the respect of the Tory squires from the hunting counties; and he had an excellent capacity and memory for all matters of arrangement and detail. He attended to his duties as one of the party whips with unfailing regularity, and could exercise with equal skill and effect the influence of persuasiveness and that of official command.

In the early days of the Parnell party there was not, to be sure, any great demand on the marshaling power of the whips over the rank and file of the little army. For a considerable time the whole Parnellite party did not consist of more than ten or a dozen members. These members, however, were compelled to do constant duty, and to maintain the great game of Parliamentary obstruction revived by Parnell at all hours of the day and the night. It was quite a common thing for a member of the party to deliver a dozen or fifteen speeches in the course of a single sitting, and John Redmond had all his work to do in endeavoring to keep exhausted colleagues up to their business and to see that they did not leave the precincts of the House until Mr. Speaker should have formally announced that the day's sitting was over. Redmond's services were of inestimable value during such a period of trial. As the days went on, the Irish constituencies became more and more aroused to the necessity of increasing as far as possible the number of thoroughgoing Parnellites in the House by getting rid, at every election, of the Irish members—Irish Whigs as they were called—who did not go in thoroughly, heart and soul, for the policy of Parnell. Under such conditions the influence and the eloquence of John Redmond were of the most substantial service to his party in the work of stirring up the national sentiment among the Irish populations in the cities and towns of England and Scotland. Before many years had passed, John Redmond was one of the whips of an Irish National party in the House of Commons which numbered nearly ninety members. The increase of official duties thus put upon him and his brother whips did not seem to trouble him in the slightest degree. He was always on duty in the House, unless when he had to be on duty at some public meeting outside its precincts; he was ever in good spirits; could always give his chief the fullest and most exact information as to the conditions of each debate, and the best methods of getting full use of the numbers and the debating strength of the Irish party at any given moment.

During the greater part of this time he had not had much opportunity of cultivating his faculty as a debater, for the whip of a party is understood to be occupied rather in putting other men up to speak than in displaying eloquence of his own, and it was for several years not quite understood by the party that John Redmond was qualified to be and was destined to be one of its most commanding spokesmen. I ought to say that among other duties discharged by John Redmond was the trying and responsible task of traveling on more than one occasion over the United States and Canada and Australia to preach the Home Rule gospel to the Irish populations in those countries and to all others who would listen, and thus to obtain the utmost possible support for the great movement at home. For many sessions, however, John Redmond was regarded by his colleagues in the House as a speaker best heard to advantage on some great public platform outside the Parliamentary precincts, and very few of them indeed had yet formed the idea that he was also qualified to become one of the foremost orators in the representative chamber itself.

I may mention here that Mr. Redmond's intimate knowledge of the rules and practices of the House and his thorough acquaintance with its business ways were, in great measure, due to his having held for a time a place in one of the offices belonging to the House of Commons. He was appointed, before he became a member of the House, a clerk in the Vote Office, a department which has to do with the preparation of Parliamentary documents, the distribution of Parliamentary papers, and other such technical work. The clerkships in these offices are in the gift of the Speaker, are an avenue towards the highest promotions in the official staff of the House, and are usually given to young men who, in addition to high education and a promise of capacity, can bring some Parliamentary or family influence to bear on their behalf. John Redmond had some experience in this Vote Office, and it made him a thorough master of Parliamentary business. I had enjoyed his personal acquaintance for some time before he came into the House as a member, and I had been in the House myself some two years before his election. I remember often seeing him and exchanging a word with him as he stood within the House itself, but just below the line which marks the place where the bar of the House is erected when there is occasion, for any public purpose, to admit a stranger thus far and no farther, in order that he may plead some cause before the House or present some petition. Officials employed in any of the offices belonging to the House are allowed the proud privilege of advancing up the floor of the chamber as far as the chair occupied by the Sergeant-at-Arms, the point at which the bar would be drawn across if occasion should require. Thus I had the opportunity of conversing with John Redmond on the floor of the House itself, before he had yet obtained the right of passing beyond the sacred line of the bar.

I am quite certain that Parnell himself did not, until the great crisis came in the Irish National party, fully appreciate the political capacity of John Redmond. Parnell always regarded him as both useful and ornamental—useful in managing the business of the party, and ornamental as a brilliant speaker on a public platform. But he did not appear to know, and had indeed no means of knowing, that Redmond had in himself the qualifications of a party leader and the debating power which could make him an influence in the House of Commons. The speeches which Redmond made, or rather was "put up" by his leader to make, in the House, had often for their object merely to fill up time and keep a debate going until the moment arrived when Parnell thought a division ought to be taken. But when the great crisis came in the affairs of the party, then Redmond was soon able to prove himself made of stronger metal than even his leader had supposed. The crisis was, of course, when the Parnell divorce case came on, and Gladstone and the Liberal leaders generally became filled with the conviction that it would be impossible to carry a measure of Home Rule if Parnell were to retain the leadership of the Irish National party. I need not go over this old and painful story again; it is enough to say that the great majority of Parnell's own followers found themselves compelled to believe that it would be better for Ireland if Parnell were to resign the leadership and retire into private life for a certain time. This Parnell refused to do, and, in opposition to the earnest wishes of the majority of his followers, he published a sort of manifesto in denunciation of Gladstone. Then came the famous meetings of the Irish party in Committee-Room No. 15—one of the committee-rooms belonging to the House of Commons—and, after long days of angry and sometimes even fierce debate, the great majority of the party declared that they could no longer follow the leadership of Parnell. The minority made up their minds to hold with Parnell for good or evil.

I am willing and always was willing to render full justice to the motives which inspired the action of the minority. They did not feel themselves called upon to justify every act of Parnell's private life, but they took the position that his private life had nothing to do with his political career, and that they could not abandon the leader who had done such service to Ireland merely because his name had become associated with a public scandal. On the other hand, the majority of the party, of whom I was one, held that their first duty was to their country, and that if the continued leadership of Parnell rendered it impossible for Gladstone to carry his Home Rule measure, they had to think only of their country and its national cause. During all these debates in Committee-Room No. 15, John Redmond took the leading part on the side of the minority. He became the foremost champion of Parnell's leadership. This position seemed to come to him as if in the nature of things. I well remember the ability and eloquence which he displayed in these debates, and the telling manner in which he put his arguments and his appeals. The course he took was all the more to his credit because Parnell had never singled him out as an object of especial favors and, indeed, in the opinion of many among us, had not done full justice to his services in the House of Commons. Then came the formal division of the party. The majority met together and reconstituted the party with a new Chairman, while the minority associated themselves with Parnell as their leader for the purpose of going over to Ireland and endeavoring to organize the country in his support. When the end of the fierce open controversy was brought about at last by Parnell's sudden death, John Redmond was made the leader of the minority, and from that time forth he began to give more and more distinct evidences of his capacity for a Parliamentary leader's position. He and his group of followers kept themselves in the House of Commons entirely apart from their former colleagues. John Redmond had often to take a part in the debates of the House, and every one could see that the serious responsibility imposed on him was developing in him qualities of leadership, and even of statesmanship, which very few indeed had previously believed to be among his gifts.

Meanwhile the state of things created in Ireland by the split and the setting up of two opposing parties was becoming intolerable. Every man of patriotic feeling on either side of the controversy was coming to see more keenly every day that the maintenance of such a division must be fatal to the cause, for at least another generation. Some efforts were made by the leading men on both sides to bring about a process of reconciliation. John Dillon on the one side, and John Redmond on the other, lent every help they could to these patriotic efforts. John Dillon had by this time become leader of the more numerous party, having been chosen to that position when the leader elected after the severance from Parnell had been compelled by ill health to resign the place. Every reasonable man among the Irish Nationalists, inside and outside Parliament, was coming more and more to see that there was no longer any occasion whatever for further severance, and that the country demanded a return to the old principle of union in the National ranks. John Dillon became impressed with the conviction that it might tend to smooth matters and to open a better chance for reconciliation if he, as one of the most conspicuous anti-Parnellites, were to resign his position, and to invite the whole party to come together again and elect a leader. Dillon was strongly of opinion that, as all matter of controversy had been buried in the early grave of Parnell, it would be better for the cause of future union that the new leader should be chosen from among the small number of men who had always adhered to Parnell's side. Dillon prevailed upon most of his friends to adopt his views on this subject. It was the custom of the Irish National party—indeed, of both the parties—to elect their leader at the opening of each session, and John Dillon had been re-elected more than once to the position of command in his own party. Accordingly, at the close of a session Dillon announced his intention to resign the place of leader, and he added to the announcement that he would not then accept re-election, even if it should be offered to him by a vote of his party. This patriotic course of action was most happy in its results. The Irish National members met together once again as a united party, and the leadership was conferred on John Redmond as an evidence alike of the confidence which was felt in his capacity and his sincerity, and a proof of the desire entertained by the majority for a thorough and cordial reunion of the whole party.

John Redmond was therefore the first leader of the whole party since the events of Committee-Room No. 15. John Dillon and his immediate predecessor had been only leaders of a majority, and now John Redmond was chosen as the leader of the whole party representing the Irish National cause in the House of Commons. He settled down at once to his new position with a temper and spirit admirably suited to the work he had to undertake. He seemed to have put away from his mind all memory of disunion in the party, and he became once more the friend as well as the leader of every member enrolled in its ranks. Many of those who formed the majority had in the first instance only yielded to the persuasion of John Dillon and others in the election of Redmond as leader merely because they believed that by such a course the interests of the cause could best be served just then. But I know that some of these men accepted with personal reluctance what seemed to be the necessity of the hour, and looked forward with anything but gratification to the prospect of having to serve under the new chief. John Redmond, while defending the cause of the still living Parnell, had shown in the service of his chief an energy and a passion which few of us could have expected of him, and was often utterly unsparing in his denunciation of the men who maintained the other side of the controversy. It was not unnatural that many of his former opponents should feel some doubt as to the possibility of working harmoniously under the leadership of a man who had been but lately so bitter an opponent. I had, at the time of the new leadership, been compelled by ill health to give up all active part in public life, but I talked with many members of the majority in the Irish party who told me frankly that they feared it would not be possible to get on under the leadership of John Redmond. Before long, however, these same men spontaneously assured me that they had changed their opinions on that subject, and were glad to find that they could work with Redmond in perfect harmony, and that his manner and bearing showed no sign whatever of any bitter memories belonging to the days of internal dispute. Redmond devoted himself absolutely to the House of Commons and the business of leadership, unless indeed when some pressing national interests compelled him to leave his place in St. Stephen's in order to see to the organization of the National cause in Ireland or in the United States. At the time when I am writing this article he has but lately returned from a visit of that kind to some of the great cities of the American Republic.

Fortunately for his country as well as for himself, John Redmond is a man of private means, is not compelled to earn a living, and can devote the whole of his time to the service of the National cause. He is always to be found at his post while the House of Commons is sitting, and I believe that his morning ride in Hyde Park with his wife every day is one of the few recreations in which he allows himself to indulge. I had not long ago a visit from a well-known member of the Irish Parliamentary party who holds one of its official positions and was at the time of the internal dispute an uncompromising opponent of Parnell's continued rule. This friend of mine I know was decidedly opposed at first to the election of John Redmond as leader, for the reason that he did not believe such an arrangement could possibly work with smoothness and satisfaction to the party. But when I saw him lately, he assured me that he had entirely changed his opinions and that he did not believe any party could possibly have a better leader than John Redmond had already proved himself to be. He had nothing but praise for Redmond's bearing and ways, for the manner in which he appeared to have banished from his mind all memory of past disunion, and for the unremitting attention with which he devoted himself to the work of the party inside and outside the House of Commons.

Since then I have heard and read nothing but good accounts of the manner in which Redmond has reorganized the party. It has under his guidance become once again a powerful force in political life. The House of Commons, as a whole, has thoroughly recognized Redmond's position, influence, and capacity. The Prime Minister has given many proofs of the importance which he attaches to Redmond's decisions and movements. The new leader of the Irish party has won a much higher rank as a Parliamentary debater than he ever had attained to in the days before he had become invested with a really grave responsibility. The newspaper critics on all sides of political life are agreed in describing him as one of the foremost living debaters. Indeed, there are but three or four men in the House of Commons who could possibly be compared with him for eloquence and skill in debate, and there is a quality of grace and artistic form in his style of eloquence which often recalls the memories of brighter days, when the art of oratory was still cultivated in Parliament. The success with which he has conducted the movements of his party has compelled Ministerialists and Opposition alike to take serious account of Redmond and his followers when the chances of any great political measure are under consideration. Only quite lately, during the passage of the Education measure, he adopted a policy which at first greatly puzzled his opponents, and at the last moment succeeded in impressing the Government and the Ministerial party generally with the conviction that Redmond understands when and how to strike a decisive blow.

Of course we hear sometimes, and of late rather often, about differences in the Irish party itself, and about a threatened secession from John Redmond's leadership. The Tory papers in England, and even some of the journals which are professedly Liberal, made eager use of this supposed dissension, and endeavored to persuade themselves and their readers that Redmond has not a full hold over his followers and over the Irish people. I may tell my American readers that they will do well not to attach the slightest importance to these stories about a threatened secession from the lately reunited Irish National party. In the first place, I never heard of any political party which did not inclose in its ranks some men who could not always be reckoned on as amenable to the discipline which is found necessary in every political organization. There is a considerable number of Liberal members who cannot be counted on to follow at all times the guidance of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There are many Ministerialists, and some of them very clever men, who have lately been proving that at times they would just as soon vote against Arthur Balfour as with him. But in regard to the Irish party and the members who do not always fall in with the wish of its leader, the actual facts are peculiar. The only members of the party who have lately been showing a tendency to mutiny are, with one exception, men of no account whatever in Ireland's political life. I do not wish to name any names, but I can state with deliberation that almost every one of the mutinous members just now is a man who has not the slightest chance of ever again being sent to represent an Irish constituency in the House of Commons. These men have long since forfeited the confidence of their constituents and their fellow-countrymen. They are perfectly aware of this fact; they know quite well that the next general election will see them put out of Parliamentary life; and, in despair of re-election, they probably think that they might as well make the most of the opportunity for rendering themselves conspicuous or for indulging in eccentricities which now can do them no further harm. It may be taken for granted that at the next general election the National constituencies of Ireland will send to the House of Commons no men who are not prepared to work in complete union with the National party, and to recognize the authority of the leader who has the confidence of his people. I do not care to waste many words on this subject, but I think it right to assure my American readers that they need not attach any serious importance to the doings of five or six men, most of whom are either mere "cranks" or are driven to desperation by disappointed personal ambition.

John Redmond has the confidence of his countrymen in England and Scotland, as well as in Ireland, and we have seen that within the last few months he has obtained full assurance that he enjoys the confidence of his countrymen in the United States, in Canada, and in Australasia. I feel all the more ready to bear my testimony to his merits and his success because of the fact that I was, during a crisis which lasted for some years, in direct opposition to the policy which he felt himself conscientiously bound to adopt. The change of events has released him from any obligation to adhere to such a policy, and I do him the justice to believe that he accepted with the sincerest and most disinterested good will the first genuine opportunity offered for a complete reunion of Irish Nationalists. John Redmond is still young enough to have a career before him, and I feel the fullest confidence in his future.