The other respects in which the War Office crippled the Nationalist efforts after recruiting were matters of detail, not of principle.  The first and best help which Redmond might expect would have come from his colleagues in the party; and all the recruiting authorities in Ireland should have been directed to secure that help locally.  No such step was taken.  No attempt was made to enlist Nationalists of position as patrons of the recruiting campaign.  In Catholic Nationalist districts it was the rule rather than the exception to select gentlemen of the Protestant Church, and of strong Unionist opinions, as recruiting officers.  If Catholic Nationalists had been selected as the official agents to assist in raising the Ulster Division, there would have been an outcry, and very rightly; it would have been contrary to common sense.  But the War Office, always even obsequiously ready to consider the Ulstermen’s point of view, completely lacked sympathy for that of the majority in Ireland.  In some cases the choice of a man locally unpopular on public grounds afforded—­to speak plainly—­an excuse for those leading Nationalists who were loath to depart from all the tradition of their lifetime.  Some of Redmond’s colleagues held that they had been “extreme men” all their lives, and they thought it too hard that they should be expected to ask Irishmen to join the English Army.  Yet these same men would have worked enthusiastically for the Volunteers, and by sympathy for their comrades who went out could have been led into a very different attitude.

Many of them, too, felt an honourable scruple about asking others to do what they could not do themselves.  As a parliamentary group we were under a singular disability.  In its early days the Irish party had been, what Sinn Fein is now, a party of the young.  But so strong was the tie of gratitude that service in its ranks became an inheritance, and in most cases a man once elected stayed on till he died or resigned.  By 1914, of all parties in the House we had by far the largest proportion of men over military age.  I question whether three out of the seventy could have passed the standard then exacted—­for two or three of the younger men were medically unfit.  In these circumstances the War Office would have been well advised to waive a regulation or two to facilitate matters; but the rigour of the rules was maintained.  One of my colleagues, a man in the early forties, offered to join as a private; he was refused.  In my own case a similar refusal was based on Lord Kitchener’s personal opinion against that of the Under-secretary for War, to whom, as a personal friend, I had written; it took nearly six months to get the decision altered; and by that time the value of example was much depreciated.  The beginning was the chance to give a lead.