On the following Thursday Mr. Asquith, as Redmond had publicly urged him to do, came to Dublin and spoke at the Mansion House with the Lord Mayor in the chair.  Mr. Dillon and Mr. Devlin, as well as Redmond, were on the same platform and spoke also.  The papers of September 25th, which reported the speeches of this notable gathering, contained also a manifesto from twenty members of the original Committee of the Volunteers, definitely breaking with Redmond’s policy and taking his speech to the Wicklow Volunteers as their cause of action.  Having recited a version of the facts which led up to the inclusion of Redmond’s nominees on the Committee, it continued: 

“Mr. Redmond, addressing a body of Irish Volunteers on last Sunday, has now announced for the Irish Volunteers a policy and programme fundamentally at variance with their own published and accepted aims and objects, but with which his nominees are, of course, identified.  He has declared it to be the duty of the Irish Volunteers to take foreign service under a Government which is not Irish.  He has made this announcement without consulting the Provisional Committee, the Volunteers themselves, or the people of Ireland, to whose service alone they are devoted.”

The next paragraph announced the expulsion of Redmond’s nominees and the reconstitution of the Committee as it existed before their admission.  Six resolutions followed.  It is noteworthy that the attitude taken up with regard to autonomy was simply “to oppose any diminution of the measure of Irish self-government which now exists as a Statute on paper,” and to repudiate any “consent to the legislative dismemberment of Ireland.”  There was no word of an Irish Republic and no explicit claim beyond immediate operation for the Home Rule Act.

Ireland’s attitude towards the war was defined by a resolution: 

“To declare that Ireland cannot, with honour or safety, take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a National Government of her own; and to repudiate the claim of any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the service of the British Empire while no National Government which could speak and act for the people of Ireland is allowed to exist.”

Mr. Asquith, when he spoke on Thursday night, must have been informed that this split was imminent, and he spoke with a view to that situation.  He said: 

“Speaking here in Dublin, I address myself for a moment particularly to the National Volunteers, and I am going to ask them all over Ireland—­not only them, but I make the appeal to them particularly—­to contribute with promptitude and enthusiasm a large and worthy contingent of recruits to the second new army of half a million which is now growing up, as it were, out of the ground.  I should like to see,