Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/277

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REDESDALE—REDMOND
259

articles for soldiers and sailors) produced by Red Cross volunteer workers during this time numbered over 370,000,000 of an estimated value of nearly $100,000,000. Eleven million of these items were knitted articles given to soldiers and sailors in the United States.

Post-war Work. On March I 1919, the War Council dissolved and all authority and responsibilities were taken over by the Ex- ecutive Committee with Dr. Livingston Farrand as chairman. The foreign commissions were gradually closed and withdrawn, although late in 1919 over 1,000 Red Cross workers still remained in Europe. The total membership after the roll-call of Nov. 1919 was about 10,000,000. After the Dec. 1920 roll-call it was about 7,000,000. Relief work was carried on after the war in Albania, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Italy, Montenegro, N. Russia, Palestine, Poland (where more than 100 workers were engaged), Serbia (where 30 doctors, 50 nurses and five dentists worked at various points), S. Russia, Switzerland (caring for American soldier prisoners coming from Ger- man prison camps), Siberia (where 600 workers fought against typhus, cholera and other epidemics), and western Russia and the Baltic states. During a part of 1920 operations still continued in most of these countries, but by the end of the year the list had been reduced to Poland, S. Russia, Czechoslovakia, Montenegro, Serbia, the Baltic states, Austria (Vienna), Hungary (Budapest) and Turkey (Constantinople). In Poland 258 hospitals with 26,123 beds were established in 1920. Thirty dispensaries and 207 orphanages were aided, clothing was distributed to over 80,000 children and 2,316 towns with a total population of more than 700,000 were given gen- eral relief. In Rumania six hospitals were operated, 322 soup kitchens maintained, and relief supplies provided for 219 schools and 232 orphanages. In western Russia and the Baltic states 300,000 civilian poor, 21,000 refugees and 2,500 war prisoners were helped. In Vienna 98 hospitals were aided. Similar work was done in Budapest. In Siberia the cargoes of 30 American relief ships, and part cargoes of 92 ships from other countries were distributed. Eighteen hos- pitals were operated and numerous sanitary trains organized and an average of seven articles of clothing was given to each of 387,500 women and 775.000 children. Late in 1920 it was decided to restrict further operations in Europe so far as possible strictly to medical care, and $5,000,000 was appropriated for this work. Twenty child medical units were put into the field. In America the peace pro- gramme of the Red Cross in 1920 contained as its most notable features the further development of its nursing service. Enrolment in this service increased in 1920 from 35,426 to 36,705. The number of Red Cross public health nurses grew from 162 to 908 and the num- ber of women and girls completing the Red Cross course in home hygiene and care of the sick increased during the year from 34,033 to 93,093. There were 57 major disasters in the United States in 1920 which required Red Cross relief. Altogether $780,000 was ex- pended in this relief. (V. L. K.)


REDESDALE, ALGERNON BERTRAM FREEMAN-MITFORD, BARON (1837-1916), British politician and writer (see 22.968), in 1906 accompanied Prince Arthur of Connaught on his mission to Japan to invest the Mikado with the Order of the Garter. In 1915 he published his memoirs. He died at Batsford Park, Glos., Aug. 17 1916. His eldest son was killed in action in May 1915, and he was succeeded as second baron by his second son, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford (b. 1877).


REDMOND, JOHN EDWARD (1851-1918), Irish politician (see 22.968*), obtained for the first time a position of real power in Parliament after the first general election of 1910. After he had amalgamated the two Irish Nationalist parties under his own lead in 1900, he had never hitherto been able, owing to the large Unionist majority of 1900, and the independent Liberal majority of 1906, to hold that balance of power in the House of Commons which had proved such a formidable weapon in the hands first of O'Connell and afterwards of Parnell. But the great reduction of the Liberal forces in Jan. 1910 made it impossible that Mr. Asquith's Government should long continue unless it found favour in Mr. Redmond's eyes. The first use which he made of this new authority was to insist that Mr. Lloyd George's fa- mous budget of 1909, on which the dissolution had turned, but which was in itself not very congenial to the Irish party, should be postponed till after the constitutional resolutions directed against the House of Lords his one object being to remove the veto of the Upper House, which was the main barrier against Home Rule. This order of procedure was also demanded by the Labour party and by the Radicals; and the Government complied. But Redmond did not trust them completely, and pressed for an assurance that the Royal prerogative would be at the Prime Minister's disposal to overbear any rejection by he Lords of the veto resolutions. He regretted King Edward's

death as being a momentary " check to the onward march of the constitutional struggle," and he was impatient at the con- stitutional conference which was called early in the new reign in order to endeavour vainly, as the result proved to dis- cover a solution by consent. He himself occupied the months of its session by a successful expedition to America to secure sympa- thy and funds. In spite of a harassing movement on his flank by a small party of Independent Nationalists who had Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Healy as their spokesmen, and who accused him of having sold the Irish vote to the Government, he subse- quently conducted a strenuous campaign on behalf of the minis- terial programme for the second general election of the year. He denounced the House of Lords as the special enemy of Ireland, and said that this was not only a Home Rule election, but the great Home Rule election. When the result of the polling had confirmed him in his tenure of the balance of Parliamentary power, he forwarded the progress of the Parliament bill in 1911 by the steady vote of his party rather than by speech. In the autumn he was regularly consulted on the details of the forth- coming Home Rule bill, and delivered speeches assuring the English that the Home Rule Parliament would be duly subordi- nate to the Imperial Parliament, and that the Protestants had nothing to fear from Roman Catholic domination, and assuring the Irish that they would find the provisions of the bill satis- factory. When the bill was introduced in April 1912, he wel- comed it in the House on behalf of the Nationalists as a great and adequate measure. He disclaimed Separatism, and said that Irish Separatists, once numerous, were now very few, and would disappear when Home Rule was granted. He went over to Ireland and succeeded in almost silencing adverse National- ist criticism of details, and procured an enthusiastic accept- ance of the bill from a Nationalist convention. His speeches during the passage of the bill through Parliament were of a moderate character and accepted the measure as a final settle- ment; but, while professing goodwill towards Ulster, he resisted any attempt to take her out of the bill as a mutilation of Ireland. In token of the union of feeling between Nationalists and Liber- als, he attended the autumn meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Nottingham in Nov. 1912, and spoke for the first time on the same platform as Mr. Asquith, saying that, on every great item of. the Liberal programme, the Nationalists were sincerely with them. When, in the next year, these began to talk, in view of the determined attitude of Ulster, of a settle- ment by consent between parties, he was very slow to agree and was criticised by the Independent Nationalists for his uncon- ciliatory attitude. He professed himself ready to discuss further safeguards; but he would not go into a conference at which Home Rule would be " put into the melting pot "; Ireland, he said, was a unit, and the two-nations theory an abomination. In a speech at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Nov. 14, he denounced the passionate opposition of the Unionists and Ulster as " a gigantic game of bluff and blackmail." He would pay a large price for settle- ment by consent; but it must be consistent with national self- government for Ireland. He constantly insisted that the bill would, under the Parliament Act, automatically become law in 1914. But, in deference to the general feeling, he said in the debate on the Address in that year that he would consider in the broadest and friendliest spirit any proposals for an agreed settlement that the Government might make, though he pro- tes ed against the idea of an Amending bill. When Mr. Asquith proposed the scheme of provisional exclusion, by county option, for six years, he treated this as the extreme limit of concession, and consequently this was the proposal which the Government embodied in their Amending bill. He absolutely refused to consider the total exclusion of Ulster. He had difficulties with the extremists in Ireland that spring and summer. The enrol- ment of the Ulster Volunteers had suggested the idea of similar formations in the other three provinces to defend the National- ist idea; and under the fostering of leaders like Casement and of the rising Sinn Fein organization, these forces had reached large numbers over 100,000 by the spring of 1914. Their growth had been discouraged by Mr. Redmond and his colleagues;

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