nt communications--a policy which
he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered
itself within six months, if it were let alone. Certainly in this case
it so happened. Long before six months were up, facts had made argument
superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the
constitutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely
from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the
outset. Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for
what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond. Yet, as I
read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil
war. To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to
him the most hateful. It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an
Ireland divided against itself by new and bloody memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his
blood--though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous,
stirred what was deepest in him--by training and conviction he was
essentially a constitutionalist: he realized profoundly how strong were
the forces behind constitutionalism in Great Britain, how impregnable
was the position of British Ministers if they boldly asserted the law
with equality as between man and man. Where he was mistaken was in his
estimate of the Government with which he had to deal, and especially of
Mr. Asquith. Speaking to his constituents early in the New Year of 1914
he said, "The Prime Minister is as firm as a rock, and is, I believe,
the strongest and sanest man who has appeared in British politics in our
time." The verdict of history might have borne out this judgment had Mr.
Asquith never been forced to face extraordinary times. In the event, it
was Mr. Asquith's lack of firmness and failure in strength which drove
Redmond into belated acceptance of a policy modelled on Sir Edward
Carson's.

As early as July 1913 the demonstrations in Ulster led to discussion of
a countermove among young men in Dublin. But there was no public
proposal, until at the end of October Professor MacNeill, Vice-President
of the Gaelic League, published an article in the League's official
organ calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. The first meeting
of a provisional committee followed a few days later. Support was asked
from all sections of Nationalist opinion; but, as a whole, members of
the United Ir