Redmond remained silent; but months later it became known that he had taken action to foster this new spirit.  He advised the Prime Minister not to proceed with the prosecution which had been threatened against the Larne gun-runners.  But at the same time he urged upon Government that they should withdraw the proclamation against importing arms:  and for this he had good reason.  The Larne affair had rendered the movement in support of the Irish Volunteers irresistible, and Redmond had decided to throw himself in with it.

The result was an amazing upward leap in the numbers of the Volunteers.  On June 15th a question brought out that they were estimated at 80,000 against 84,000 of the Ulster force; but the Nationalist body was increasing at the rate of 15,000 a week.  By July 9th they were reckoned (on police information) at 132,000, of whom nearly forty thousand were Army reservists.

These facts now dominated the situation.  It was now abundantly clear that if passing Home Rule meant civil war, so also would the abandonment of Home Rule.  On June 16th Lord Robert Cecil raised a debate on the new danger.  In that debate words were quoted from Sir Roger Casement, one of the most active promoters of the movement:  “When you are challenged on the field of force, it is upon that field you must reply.”  Mr. Dillon, who exulted in the “splendid demonstration of national sentiment shown in the uprising of the National Volunteers,” urged strongly that the growth of a rival body was not a menace to public order but an added security.  The armed Ulstermen would be “much slower to break the peace” when they realized the certainty of formidable resistance—­and this, be it said, was no ungrounded observation.  Yet at the same time the very success of the Volunteer movement was disquieting Redmond.  He was not in the same position as Sir Edward Carson, who from the first had directed, presided over, and controlled the raising and equipment of his force; and unless the force were to be a menace to his leadership, he must secure control.  As Mr. Bulmer Hobson puts it in his History of the Irish Volunteers: 

“The Volunteers had men in their ranks who were political followers of Mr. Redmond’s, and men who were not, and who never had been.  The latter were willing to help him if he had been ready to help them; they would have made terms with him, but were not prepared to be merely absorbed into his movement.”

The strength of Redmond’s position lay in the fact that the vast majority of the enrolled men looked to him as their leader:  his weakness, in that the committees under which enrolment had taken place were largely composed of the extremist section.  He now determined to unite the Volunteers with the parliamentary party as the Ulster Volunteers were linked with Sir Edward Carson and his civilian organization.