addressed a great meeting
in Cork and told them, "I won't say to you go, but come with me." He was
then fifty-three--and for most men it would have been "too late a
week." But no man was ever more instinctively a soldier, and to
soldiering he had gone by instinct as a boy. He was an officer in the
Wexford Militia for a year or two, till politics drove him out of that
service and drew him into another. Now he went to the war gravely but
joyfully. I think those days did not bring into relief any more
picturesque or sympathetic figure.

One thing ought to be said. Mr. Devlin wished to join also, but Redmond
held that he could not be spared from Ireland, where his influence was
enormous; and he was placed in a somewhat unfair position, even though
everyone who knew him knew that his chief attribute was personal
courage. But he was indispensable for the work which had to be done, of
helping at this strange crisis to keep Ireland peaceful and united at a
time when Government was at its lowest ebb of authority.

Trouble threatened. On October 11th, the anniversary of Parnell's death,
three bodies of Volunteers turned out in Dublin--the National
Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army. A collision
occurred which might easily have become serious. This passed off, but
early in December the Government suppressed three or four of the openly
anti-British papers, which were, of course, still more virulent against
Redmond. They reappeared under other names. But a meeting of protest
against the suppression was held outside Liberty Hall. Mr. Larkin had,
by this time, gone to America. His chief colleague, Mr. James Connolly,
who was the brain of the Irish Labour Movement, presided, and at the
close declared that the meeting had been held under the protection of an
armed company of the Citizen Army posted in the windows and on the roof
of Liberty Hall. Had the police or military attempted to disperse the
meeting, he said, "those rifles would not have been silent."

Ulster was not the only place where armed men thought themselves
entitled to resist coercion.

Dublin was the more dangerous because the war, which created so much
employment in Great Britain, brought no new trade to Ireland, outside of
Belfast. Agriculture prospered, but the towns knew only a rise of
prices. Redmond began with high hopes, which Mr. Lloyd George fostered,
of rapidly-developing munition works, which would at the close of
hostilities leave the