But in Dublin the opponents were nearly 2,000 out of 6,700; and two strong battalions went almost solid against Redmond.  These battalions, along with the Citizens’ Army, were destined to alter the course of Irish history.  It was specially true of them, but true generally of all the minority who left Redmond, that they were kept together by a resolute and determined group who had a clear purpose.

The “Irish Volunteers,” as the dissentients called themselves, were made to feel that they were a minority, and an unpopular minority in more than one instance.  In Galway, when they turned out to parade the streets, they were driven off with casualties—­retaliation for their interference with our meeting in September.  In Dundalk there was a somewhat similar occurrence.  But they got more than their own back one day in November by a bold coup—­forerunner of many.  Ninety rifles belonging to the National Volunteers were being moved in a cart from one place to another.  Half a dozen men armed with revolvers held up the cart and its driver and carried off the rifles.  At their Convention, held in the end of October, Professor MacNeill said:  “They would go on with the work of organizing, training and equipping a Volunteer force for the service of Ireland in Ireland, and such a force might yet be the means of saving Home Rule from disaster, and of compelling the Home Rule Government to keep faith with Ireland without the exaction of a price in blood.”

That forecast has not as yet realized itself; and many of us think that the chief achievement of this section has been to turn to waste a heavy price that was paid in blood by other men for the sake of Ireland.  But unquestionably they were, though the minority, far more of a living reality than the mass of the original force—­and for a simple reason.  Their purpose, whether good or bad, was within their own control.  The purpose of the majority was to carry out Redmond’s policy—­which was to make the Volunteers part of an Irish army of which the striking force was designed to defend Ireland on the battlefields of Flanders.  But to carry out that policy the National Volunteers must be accepted as a purely local Irish military organization for home defence—­controlled, in the absence of a popularly elected Irish Government, by the elected Irish representatives.  The War Office thwarted that policy.  Lord Kitchener would not accept it.  He continued to be of the opinion that by equipping Redmond’s followers he would be arming enemies.

It is worth noting that one of the ablest and most detached students of Irish affairs was wholly on Redmond’s side.  Lord Dunraven, appealing on behalf of “the new Irish Brigade,” pointed out that both sides of Redmond’s policy must be accepted.  “No scheme which fails to take some account of the National Volunteer Force can do justice to what Ireland can give,” he wrote.  But was there everywhere a desire to do justice to what Ireland could give—­and