Redmond rose at once.  He denounced the view that Ireland had gained an advantage, or desired to gain one.  The Prime Minister had at every stage assured him that the Bill would be put on the Statute Book in that session, and therefore it was unjust to say that his loyalty was only conditional; he had asked for nothing that was not won in advance.  Now, instead of an Act to become immediately operative, Ireland received one with at least a year’s delay.  Yet this moratorium did not seem to him unreasonable.

“When everybody is preoccupied by the war and when everyone is endeavouring—­and the endeavour will be made as enthusiastically in Ireland as anywhere else in the United Kingdom—­to bring about the creation of an Army, the idea is absurd that under these circumstances a new Government and a new Parliament could be erected in Ireland.”

Further, it gave time for healing work.  The two things that he cared for most “in this world of politics” were:  first, that “not a single sod of Irish soil and not a single citizen of the Irish nation” should be excluded from the operation of Irish self-government; secondly, that no coercion should be applied to any single county in Ireland to force their submission.

The latter of these ideals was cast up to him by many in Ireland, first in private grumblings, afterwards with public iteration.  He saw and admitted, what these critics urged, that the one aspiration made the other impossible of fulfilment, for the moment.  Would it be so, he asked, after an interval in which Ulstermen and other Irishmen, Nationalist and Unionist, would be found fighting and dying side by side on the battlefield on the Continent, and at home, as he hoped and believed, drilling shoulder to shoulder for the defence of the shores of their own country?

On that hint he renewed his appeal to the Ulster Volunteers for co-operation and regretted that he had got no response from them.  More than that, he urged that his appeal to Government had got no response.  “If they had done something to arm, equip and drill a certain number at any rate of the National Volunteers the recruiting probably would have been faster than it had been.”  Alluding to the taunts at Ireland’s shirking which had been bandied about in interruptions during the debate, he recalled the stories which already had come back from France of Irish valour; of the Munster Fusiliers who stood by their guns all day and in the end dragged them back to their lines themselves; the story told by wounded French soldiers who had seen the Irish Guards charge three German regiments with the bayonet, singing a strange song that the Frenchmen had never heard before—­“something about God saving Ireland.”

“I saw these men,” said Redmond, “marching through London on their way to the station; they marched here past this building singing ’God save Ireland!’”

But he could not rest his claim, and had no intention of resting it, merely on the prowess of the Irish regulars already in the army.