Thus began in a small sectional manner a national movement which led far indeed.  Mr. O’Cathasaigh, from whose Story of the Irish Citizen Army I quote, attributes the failure of that purely Labour organization chiefly to the establishment of the Irish Volunteers.

This was a development which Redmond on his part neither willed nor approved, yet one which in the circumstances was inevitable.  Who could suppose that the formation of combatant forces would remain a monopoly of any party?  There was no mistaking the weight which a hundred thousand Ulster Volunteers, drilled and regimented, threw into Sir Edward Carson’s advocacy.  As early as September 1913, during the parliamentary recess, Redmond received at least one letter—­and possibly he received many—­urging him to raise the standard of a similar force, and pointing out that if he did not take this course it might be taken by others less fit to guide it.  The letter of which I speak elicited no answer.  It was never his habit to reply to inconvenient communications—­a policy which he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered itself within six months, if it were let alone.  Certainly in this case it so happened.  Long before six months were up, facts had made argument superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the constitutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the outset.  Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond.  Yet, as I read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil war.  To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to him the most hateful.  It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an Ireland divided against itself by new and bloody memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his blood—­though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous, stirred what was deepest in him—­by training and conviction he was essentially a constitutionalist:  he realized profoundly how strong were the forces behind constitutionalism in Great Britain, how impregnable was the position of British Ministers if they boldly asserted the law with equality as between man and man.  Where he was mistaken was in his estimate of the Government with which he had to deal, and especially of Mr. Asquith.  Speaking to his constituents early in the New Year of 1914 he said, “The Prime Minister is as firm as a rock, and is, I believe, the strongest and sanest man who has appeared in British politics in our time.”  The verdict of history might have borne out this judgment had Mr. Asquith never been forced to face extraordinary times.  In the event, it was Mr. Asquith’s lack of firmness and failure in strength which drove Redmond into belated acceptance of a policy modelled on Sir Edward Carson’s.