Excerpt from The Life of John Redmond The publishers of this book have suggested that it should be prefaced with a brief synopsis of Irish history since 1798, to provide, as it were, a back-ground against which the life of John Redmond may be set. To write such a synopsis is a task less easy than it might appear. The very date selected as its starting-point is chal lenging. It invites a begging of the whole Irish question. Did the Rebellion of I 798, as Union ists assert, justify the Act of Legislative Union between Ireland and Great Britain? Or was that Rebellion, as Nationalists reply, deliberately pro yoked with the Object of providing a specious pretence of justification for the Union? It is, in fact, impossible that any survey of Irish history, however brief, should be taken up arbitrarily from the date of I 798 without reference to what went before it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.