any- case, or, if the war was not then ended, before such further
date, not later than the termination of the war, as might be
fixed by Order in Council.
This action of the Government in taking advantage of the " party truce " to place Home Rule upon the Statute Book,
though it rallied the more moderate Nationalists to cornmon cause, was strongly resented by Union-
ists both in England and Ireland; and Mr. Bonar Law denounced it in the House of Commons as a breach of faith. His language was reechoed by Sir Edward Carson in a manifesto to the Ulster loyalists, in which he reiterated the determination of Ulster never to submit to Home Rule, but at the same time urged his followers, in view of the peril to the Empire, to be true to their motto of " our country first." At a great meeting held on Sept. 28 to celebrate the second anni- versary of Ulster Day he spoke in the same sense. On Sept. 16 the executive committee of the Irish Unionist Alliance, repre- senting the Unionists of the three southern provinces, also passed a resolution condemning " the flagrant breach of faith by the Government," but at the same time added another pointing out " the duty of Irishmen to undertake their full ghare of Imperial responsibility in the present national emergency " and calling upon its members and supporters to continue their efforts to secure recruits for the army.
It seemed of happy augury that on this same Sept. 16 Mr. Redmond also issued a manifesto calling on the people of
Ireland to take their part in this great national crisis Spilt in the an( j asking that Irish recruits for the expeditionary vo/u/i"eer force should be kept together in an Irish Brigade Movement, under Irish officers. The latter demand was endorsed
by the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, at a great re- cruiting meeting held at the Dublin Mansion House on Sept. 25, at which Mr. Redmond again urged his countrymen to enlist. Meanwhile, however, though there had been no outward sign of disunion in the committee of the National Volunteers, it had from the first been clear that its Sinn Fein members were determined to resist recruiting in every way, and on the eve of the Mansion House meeting (Sept. 24) 20 members of the committee, headed by the chairman, Prof. MacNeill, is- sued a manifesto denouncing Mr. Redmond for consenting to " a dismemberment of Ireland " and accusing him of be- ing willing to " risk another disruption " by announcing for the Irish Volunteers " a programme fundamentally at vari- ance with their own published and accepted aims and pledges," viz. that it was their duty to take foreign service under a Govern- ment which was not Irish. In view of this attitude the signa- tories declared that the nominees of Mr. Redmond ceased to be members of the Provisional Committee, and they ended their pronouncement by reaffirming without qualification the mani- festo proposed and adopted at the inaugural meeting, repudiat- ing any undertaking for the partition of Ireland and declaring that Ireland could not, with honour or safety, take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a National Government of her own.' That this manifesto had a strong support among the Dublin Volunteers was shown on the follow- ing night, for while a few acted as sentinels at the Mansion House several thousand paraded in Sackville Street amid dense masses of spectators, in support of Prof. MacNeill. This was a declaration of war against the Nationalist party, and Mr. Redmond was prompt to take it up. He appealed, with strik- ing success, to the provincial centres; and at a convention of Volunteers held in Dublin on Sept. 30 a new Provisional Com- mittee was elected, with Mr. Redmond as president. The Sinn Fein leaders who had signed the manifesto of the 25th thereupon seceded and proceeded to organize a force of their own under the style of the Irish Volunteers.
This movement was not at the time regarded as serious.
1 Published in the Irish Volunteer, Oct. 3 1914. Among the signa- tories were Patrick H. Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Thomas Mac- Donagh, and other leaders of the 1916 rebellion. Regret was ex- pressed that, owing to his absence in America, the signature of Sir Roger Casement was not attached.
The spokesmen of Sinn Fein were men of no particular position or weight; and there was plentiful evidence that their gospel of hate made little appeal to the people at large, and that the interest of Ireland in the victory Ireland of the Empire was all but universally recognized. al ' From Tyrone, for instance, the very storm centre of sectarian strife, the police had reported in June that " distrust and hatred between Catholic and Protestant had never been so deep " within their memory ; a few weeks later they reported that, during the mobilization, Ulster and National Volunteers were turning out together with their bands to escort the troops leav- ing for the front. The same was true, in varying degrees, of all parts of the country: "the outbreak of war" to quote the police reports " worked a revolution in the state of party feeling." Here and there, as e.g. in Monaghan and West- meath, agrarian trouble continued intermittently, but from Aug. 4 1914 to the end of 1915 the reports from every county in the four provinces agree that " there were practically no displays of party feeling." Ireland seemed at last united in a common effort directed to a common end. The union seemed to be symbolized by the support given to the National Volun- teers by the prominent Unionists in the South and the occasional fraternization of the Ulster and National Volunteers in the North. To those who know Ireland and its deep-seated passions and antagonisms the mere list of the names of the notabilities who attended the great recruiting meeting at Warrenpoint in county Down (July 7 1915) reads like a miracle: there were pres- ent the Lord Lieutenant (the Marquess of Aberdeen), Mr. Justice Ross, 2 Mr. W. A. Redmond, the Lord Mayors of Dublin and Cork and the Mayor of Londonderry. It was character- istic of the spirit of this unique year in Irish history.
Beneath the surface, however, the passions simmered, the antagonisms still glowed. The index to the true feelings of the people, the measure of their devotion, were the returns of the number of recruits to the army and to ^ c / the various bodies of Volunteers. For the famous Irish regiments of the regular army recruiting was at first brisk, though even their cadres had to be filled up with English recruits who happened to be training in Ireland. 3 In the towns of Ulster recruiting was from the first fairly satisfactory, while as was also the case in the South the men of the countryside hung back. Of the Ulster Volunteers, numbering 85,000 in Aug. 1914, 20,700 had joined the army by the end of Dec., this number representing the mass of those who were at that time of military age. The returns of enlistments from the ranks of the National Volunteers were less satisfactory; but under the stimulus of the eloquence of the Nationalist leaders the situation in this respect was much improved later, the official returns showing that between Dec. 15 1914 and Dec. 15 1915, 10,794 joined the colours. It is clear, however, from these returns that there was never any question of either body of Volunteers joining the army en masse, and that the main source of recruits lay outside them. At the close of the year 1915 the Ulster Volunteers still numbered 56,000, while the number of National Volunteers, which had reached 1 78,649 in Oct. 1914, had only sunk to 152,090.
The unsatisfactory results of the recruiting campaign have been ascribed to a variety of causes. 4 Mr. Lloyd George himself blamed " the folly almost amounting to malignancy of the War Office," which had refused to entertain the idea of turning the National Volunteers into an Irish Army Corps and had rejected the offer of a group of loyal Irish ladies to work flags for the new regiments. But in judging the War Office for its refusal to consider the formation of a separate Irish Army Corps, two things have to be remembered. In the early and
2 Sir John Ross, appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland in July 1921.
'After the retreat from Mons the urgent need for replenishing infantry battalions led to the drafting of Irish recruits who had en- listed in the Irish cavalry into English line regiments. This was greatly resented.
4 Much was due to defective organization. In many cases the ardour of would-be soldiers was damped when they found that they had to go 30 or 40 m. to the nearest recruiting station.
