Landlords, agents, tenants, representatives for Ulster as well as from the South and West, were parties to this plan.

Lord Midleton now looked back on the past as one who had been in the fight since Mr.Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill.
Every fresh settlement had been wrecked, he said, by standing for the last shred of the demand.

In 1885, if Gladstone had abandoned the identity of democratic franchise for both countries and had made to the Irish minority such concessions as this Convention was willing to make, he would have carried the Liberal Unionist element with him.

Then, as now, a great land purchase scheme depended on the solution of the main problem.

To-day land purchase stood or fell with the Convention.
He was backed by Lord Dunraven--who waived his preference for his own original proposal--and by Lord Desart, in most able argument: the latter declaring that the proposal to give Ireland a separate customs system could never be carried in England.