Leaf 3 recto

and to kill off the language so far as it would be killed by rules and regulations,
as I have no doubt at all that it would have done
from the very first if it had showed the
least tendency towards anti-English politics. I feel quite
satisfied in my own mind that the rigid non-
-political attitude was the one thing that
saved the League during the first dozen years,
for everyone had a good word to say of it
and nobody spoke against it. The members
of Parliament alone, or at least a considerable
number of them, were always [of] suspicious of
the movement, but a few like John Boland
and Stephen Gwynn took it up warmly, and
this was sufficient to neutralise any future hostility on the part of the rest.

At an early period I had to tackle the