248	ENGLISH    SAGA
Yet the leader was forthcoming. He was a Protestant, an
aristocrat and a landowner: the last man in the world any one
would have predicted as a lawgiver to poor, squalid, rebel
Ireland. He despised the arts of the demagogue: loathed crowds
and politicians, and had an icy pride and reserve which few even
of his closest lieutenants could penetrate. But he had three
supreme assets: brilliant intellectual power, unshakable resolve
and a cold burning passion which nothing could quench. That
icy flame Charles Stewart Parndl applied for twenty years to a
single task: the breaking of the link -that bound Ireland to
England.
His work began in the 'seventies when he first entered the
House of Commons as member for County Meath. Until that
time the Irish members had been an ineffective body, regarded
by the desperate men who rode the stormy anarchy of Irish
assassination and land agitation as helpless prisoners of England.
Parndl realised from the first that the key to the Irish future
lay at Westminster. If he could weld the four score or more
members whom Catholic Ireland returned to the imperial
parliament into a single disciplined body, he might use the
balanced rivalry of the English parties to wring legal concessions
that would open the road to Irish independence.
In the new Parliament of 1880 Parndl began to make his
power fdt He discovered that by taking advantage of the
intricate rules of parliamentary procedure which had grown up
in the course of centuries, he could trepan the conservative
English with their own love of legality. His quick penetrating
mind made him master of these, and he taught his followers
how to use them. There ensued an extraordinary situation.
Night after night the most dignified and orderly parliamentary
assembly in the world was hdd up by an interminable succession
of unnecessary speeches, questions and interruptions as Irish
member after member rose to dday business. The administration
of a great Empire was hamstrung because, through an irony of
fate, a handful of resolute and alien obstructionists happened to
be members of its sovereign assembly.
By his success Parndl achieved two things. He became the
most hated man jn EnglandL He united the Irish nationalists.
It became realised that the battle of wits that the Irish members
were waging nightly at Westminster was a struggle for the
rebirth of a nation. It was more. It was a gauntlet flung down