IRISH NATIONALIST PARTY

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 150, 14 March 1918, Page 7

IRISH NATIONALIST PARTY

MR. DILLON ELECTED LEADER.

(Rec. March 13, 9.30 p.m.)

London, March 12.

Mr. John Dillon has been xinaniniously'eleoted Leader of the Irish Nationalist Party.—Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn.

[Mr. William O'Brien, in his "Recolleotions," relates, that his first glimpse of Mr. John Dillon, with whom he "was destined to be associated for manyeventful years, was at an election meeting in Roscrea, at which tho Mitchel campaign began." That must lave been as long ago as 1874. "Hia great height looked all tho vaster for his thin and wasted limbs, upon which the languor of death seemed to bo fastening." However that may have been, Mr. Dillon has been very much alive since, it is true that the melancholic young surgeon of 1374 has never abandoned the uncheerful air which struck Mr. O'Brien so forcibly; and for a dozen years he filled the House of Commons with the most blood-curdling invective, uttered with a deathly impassivity that paralysed all criticism. His only reward for thus distinguishing himself was to he called by Mr. T. M. Healy, on a notablo occasion, "a melancholy humbug." He has never forgiven Mr. Healy this philippic He sjient some years in California in the 'eighties, and on.his return he started with Mr. O'Brien the Plan of Campaign, which ruined a good many tenant farmers and did no particular good to anybody. While Mr. Healy was fighting the case of tho Nationalists who resented the betrayal of their cause by Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon took a holiday in Galway gaol; when he came out he set himself to lght Mr. Healy. The secret of it was that, as Mr. O'Brien plaintively put it at Boulogne, "John wants tho Chair," and John got it for a time, until the reunion of 1900 put Mr. Redmond into possession of il-1