But in Dublin the opponents were nearly 2,000 out of 6,700; and two
strong battalions went almost solid against Redmond. These battalions,
along with the Citizens' Army, were destined to alter the course of
Irish history. It was specially true of them, but true generally of all
the minority who left Redmond, that they were kept together by a
resolute and determined group who had a clear purpose.

The "Irish Volunteers," as the dissentients called themselves, were made
to feel that they were a minority, and an unpopular minority in more
than one instance. In Galway, when they turned out to parade the
streets, they were driven off with casualties--retaliation for their
interference with our meeting in September. In Dundalk there was a
somewhat similar occurrence. But they got more than their own back one
day in November by a bold _coup_--forerunner of many. Ninety rifles
belonging to the National Volunteers were being moved in a cart from one
place to another. Half a dozen men armed with revolvers held up the cart
and its driver and carried off the rifles. At their Convention, held in
the end of October, Professor MacNeill said: "They would go on with the
work of organizing, training and equipping a Volunteer force for the
service of Ireland in Ireland, and such a force might yet be the means
of saving Home Rule from disaster, and of compelling the Home Rule
Government to keep faith with Ireland without the exaction of a price in
blood."

That forecast has not as yet realized itself; and many of us think that
the chief achievement of this section has been to turn to waste a heavy
price that was paid in blood by other men for the sake of Ireland. But
unquestionably they were, though the minority, far more of a living
reality than the mass of the original force--and for a simple reason.
Their purpose, whether good or bad, was within their own control. The
purpose of the majority was to carry out Redmond's policy--which was to
make the Volunteers part of an Irish army of which the striking force
was designed to defend Ireland on the battlefields of Flanders. But to
carry out that policy the National Volunteers must be accepted as a
purely local Irish military organization for home defence--controlled,
in the absence of a popularly elected Irish Government, by the elected
Irish representatives. The War Office thwarted that policy. Lord
Kitchener would not accept it. He continued to be of the opinion that by
equipping Red