Trouble threatened.  On October 11th, the anniversary of Parnell’s death, three bodies of Volunteers turned out in Dublin—­the National Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army.  A collision occurred which might easily have become serious.  This passed off, but early in December the Government suppressed three or four of the openly anti-British papers, which were, of course, still more virulent against Redmond.  They reappeared under other names.  But a meeting of protest against the suppression was held outside Liberty Hall.  Mr. Larkin had, by this time, gone to America.  His chief colleague, Mr. James Connolly, who was the brain of the Irish Labour Movement, presided, and at the close declared that the meeting had been held under the protection of an armed company of the Citizen Army posted in the windows and on the roof of Liberty Hall.  Had the police or military attempted to disperse the meeting, he said, “those rifles would not have been silent.”

Ulster was not the only place where armed men thought themselves entitled to resist coercion.

Dublin was the more dangerous because the war, which created so much employment in Great Britain, brought no new trade to Ireland, outside of Belfast.  Agriculture prospered, but the towns knew only a rise of prices.  Redmond began with high hopes, which Mr. Lloyd George fostered, of rapidly-developing munition works, which would at the close of hostilities leave the foundation for industrial communities.  Here again, however, Redmond’s representations were in vain.  When the heavy extra tax on beer and spirits was levied by the first supplementary Budget, he opposed it angrily: 

“You are doing some shipbuilding at Belfast, you are making a few explosives at Arklow, you are buying some woollen goods from some of the smaller manufacturers, but apart from that, the bulk of the hundreds of millions of borrowed money which you are spending on the war is being spent in England and in increasing the income of your country.”

This tax on alcohol would curtail the most important urban industry of the South and West of Ireland, and he feared that it was the old story of crushing Ireland’s trade under the wheel of British interests.

Here again Redmond could only plead with the Irish Government that they, in their turn, should plead with the Imperial authorities.  He should have been able to act in his own right as the head of an Irish Ministry, knowing the importance of providing employment at such a time.  He saw the need and how to meet it; but he had none of the resources of power.  As compared with the other men who occupied, in the public eye, a rank equivalent to his—­with General Botha, for instance—­he was like a commander of those Russian armies which had to take the field against Germans with sticks and pikes.