This chapter has evolved from a wider study of the first Home Rule crisis, undertaken in reaction to the exclusively ‘high political’ perspective of Dr A. B. Cooke and Professor John Vincent's The Governing Passion. Its starting point is an observation made by Dr Peter Marsh in an essay on Joseph Chamberlain's role in the Liberal schism, that ‘the passions aroused by that crisis among politicians in Britain had little to do with Ireland and an extraordinary amount to do with loyalty among leaders, friends and followers’. He argues that, notwithstanding the title of their study, Cooke and Vincent tended to underplay the element of ‘passion’ which the crisis generated. Marsh's own analysis of the part played by Chamberlain's tempestuous personality goes some way to redrawing the picture. By drawing on a wide range of manuscript, pamphlet and newspaper sources, this chapter aims to show that the personal attachments and enmities which were so powerful a force in the world of Westminster were no less real in the constituencies. Indeed, though rank-and-file radicals were often very conscious of the peculiarity of the problems of Ireland and some of the Lib.–Labs. had been supporting devolution for years, many Liberal supporters were unfamiliar with Home Rule as a question of practical politics; and given the uncertainty and the conflicting emotions which its adoption as party policy aroused, it might be argued that the personalities of the leading figures assumed a proportionately greater influence at local level than they did even at Westminster.