Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/477

 had to face lay in Ulster, of which, like most Irishmen of the South, he knew little. He accepted the view that Ulster's military preparations were only a bluff; and he did not realize how strong a feeling was growing among the young generation of Irishmen that Ulster had set an example to all Ireland. When the Irish volunteer movement was started in the close of 1913, he watched it with suspicion; but in the spring of 1914 the ‘Curragh mutiny’, followed by the Larne gun-running, revealed to him the full seriousness of the situation. Then, and only then, he threw his support into the volunteer movement, and Ireland came into it en masse; but the control of the volunteer organization was already very largely in the hands of men whose purpose was different from his. Yet he was still confident of his power to direct events in Ireland. In this year he visited one of his friends, a leading priest in county Tipperary, who asked him ‘Is there anything that can rob us this time?’ Redmond paused, and said ‘A European war might do it’.

In July 1914 he took part with Mr. Dillon in the abortive conference at Buckingham Palace. On 26 July came the attempt of Crown forces to take rifles from Irish volunteers on the road from Howth, and the subsequent affray when soldiers fired without orders on a Dublin crowd. A week later parliament was confronted with the announcement of war, and Redmond, rising in the debate, made his declaration that all troops could be withdrawn from Ireland. The Irish volunteers would guard the country—‘For that purpose the armed Catholics in the south will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen.’ He had spoken without consultation; but the reception of his words in Ireland as well as in England led the party to endorse Mr. Dillon's opinion that the speech had been a ‘great stroke of statesmanship’. It was, however, largely foiled by the War Office, which refused to accept Redmond's proposal that the volunteers should receive recognition and, so far as possible, arms and training. Lord Kitchener held that this would be to arm rebels. Even the project of forming a distinctively Irish division, to correspond to that already sanctioned for Ulster, met with constant rebuffs. But Redmond persisted in his endeavour to create in Ireland an atmosphere favourable to recruiting. When the Coalition was formed (May 1915), a post in the Cabinet, but not an Irish post, was offered him, and was refused: he held strongly that Sir Edward Carson also should decline office in view of the effect on Ireland. This view did not prevail, and Irish recruiting dropped from 6,000 in May to 3,000 in June. Later, mainly through Redmond's efforts, it recovered, and by November the National Volunteers had sent 27,054 men to the colours, the Ulster Volunteers 27,412. But conscription was now in sight, and Redmond plainly told Mr. Asquith that the enforcement of it in Ireland would be an impossibility. He had so far impressed old opponents that in May 1916 Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson supported him in opposing the inclusion of Ireland in the first National Service Bill. Ireland had then furnished at least 100,000 soldiers, of whom the majority were Catholic. He himself had visited the front in November 1915 and come back with the sense that ‘from the commander-in-chief himself right down through the army one meets Irishmen wherever one goes’. He was even prouder of this than of the welcome which met him everywhere.

But in Ireland disaffection was spreading. Redmond underrated the danger, but gave certain advice to the government. ‘What I did suggest, they never did; what I said they ought not to do, they always did,’ was his own account of these communications. The Rebellion (April 1916) however, took him absolutely by surprise, and in parliament he expressed ‘detestation and horror’ of the events in Dublin. He denounced it in a public manifesto as a German intrigue, ‘not half so much treason to the cause of the Allies as treason to the cause of Home Rule.’ He accepted as just the executions of three leaders in the rising; but for the rest he begged that the leniency shown by Botha in South Africa should be imitated. As before, his advice was rejected. ‘I have had no power in the government of Ireland,’ he said in parliament, ‘all my suggestions have been overborne … and my conviction is that if we had had the power and responsibility for the government of our country during the past two years, recent occurrences in Ireland would never have taken place.’ Many shared this opinion, and negotiations were begun to bring Home Rule into operation. On the faith of a written document, Redmond, with Mr. Devlin's aid, persuaded the nationalists of Ulster to agree to the temporary exclusion of six counties. The Cabinet then repudiated the agreement, which had been made by Mr. Lloyd George with Mr. Asquith's 451