Two views were taken of the proposal to encourage and utilize the Irish Volunteers.  The first view was that Volunteers of any kind were a superfluous encumbrance at a moment when the supreme need was for men in the actual fighting-line; that encouragement of Volunteers gave an excuse for shirking war; and further, that Volunteers outside the State’s control were a danger; that the danger was increased when there were two rival Volunteer forces which might fly at each other’s throats; and that it was a matter for satisfaction that one of these forces should be very greatly inferior to the other in point of arms and equipment, so that considerations of prudence would lessen the chance of collision.  This satisfaction was greatly heightened by the reflection that the armed force was thoroughly loyal to the Empire and could be trusted to assist troops in the case of any attack upon the Empire begun by the other—­a contingency which should always be taken into account.

This line of thought was certainly Lord Kitchener’s.  He had no distrust of Irish soldiers in ordinary regiments; no professional soldier ever had.  But he had a deep distrust of a purely Irish military organization under Irish control.  At the back of Lord Kitchener’s mind was the determination “I will not arm enemies.”  This was the very negation and the antithesis of the second view, which was Redmond’s.

Redmond’s aim was to win the war, no less than Lord Kitchener’s.  But if Lord Kitchener realized more clearly than other men in power how far-reaching would be the need for troops, Redmond realized also far more than the men in power how vital would be the need for America.  He saw from the first, knowing the English-speaking world far more widely than perhaps any member of the Government, that the Irish trouble could not limit its influence to Ireland only.  Greater forces could be conciliated for war purposes by reconciliation with Ireland—­by bringing Ireland heart and soul into the war—­than the equivalent of many regiments.  Yet even from the narrower aspect of finding men, he regarded the same policy as essential.  He assumed that recruiting in Ireland must always be voluntary—­at any rate a matter for Ireland’s own decision:  the question was how to get most troops.  Knowing Ireland, he recognized how complete was the estrangement of its population from the idea of ordinary enlistment.  The bulk of the population were on the land, and in Ireland, as in Great Britain, “gone for a soldier” was a word of disgrace for a farmer’s son.  More than that, the political organization of which he was head had inculcated an attitude of aloofness from the Army because it was the Army which held Ireland by force.  Enlistment had been discouraged, on the principle that from a military point of view Ireland was regarded as a conquered country.  A test case had arisen over the Territorial Act, which was not extended to Ireland, any more than the Volunteer Acts had been.  We had voted against Lord Haldane’s Bill on the express ground that it put Ireland into this status of inferiority and withheld from Irishmen that right to arm and drill which was pressed upon Englishmen as a patriotic duty.  We had explicitly declared then in 1907 that our influence should and must be used against enlistment.