ther was Ulster. No attempt was made to make it so, and General
Parsons would have quite definitely rejected any such ideal--though less
fiercely than he would have repudiated the idea of handicapping a man
for his opinions or his creed. Yet many persons without design, and some
with a purpose, spread broadcast the belief that Catholics and
Nationalists as such were relegated to a position of inferiority in the
command of this Catholic and Nationalist Division.

The worst of our difficulties lay in the long inherited suspicions of
the Irish mind. At a recruiting meeting one would argue in appealing to
Nationalists that the Home Rule Act was a covenant on which we were in
honour bound to act, and that every man who risked his life on the faith
of that covenant set a seal upon it which would never be disregarded.
The listeners would applaud, but after the meeting one and another would
come up privately and say: "Are you sure now they aren't fooling us
again?" The Sinn Fein propaganda, always shrewdly conducted, did not
fail to emphasize the pronouncement of the Tory Press that there should
be no Home Rule because Ireland had failed to come forward; or to point
the moral of Mr. Bonar Law's excursion to Belfast, with its violent
asseveration that Ulster should be backed without limit in opposition to
control by an Irish Parliament. Ireland, always suspect, has learnt to
be profoundly suspicious; and suspicion is the form of prophecy which
has most tendency to fulfil itself.

In one part of the Irish race, however, this cold paralysis of distrust
had no operation. The Irish in Great Britain, always outdoing all others
in the keenness of their Nationalism, were nearer the main current of
the war, and were more in touch with the truth about English feeling.
They had a double impulse, as Redmond had; they saw how to serve their
own cause in serving Europe's freedom; and their response was
magnificent. Mr. T.P. O'Connor probably raised more recruits by his
personal appeal than any other man in England.

A great part of Redmond's correspondence in these months came from
Irishmen in England who were joining as Irishmen, and who had great
difficulty in making their way to our Division. Many thousands had
already enlisted elsewhere; hundreds, at least, tried to join the
Sixteenth Division, and failed to get there. But there was one instance
to which attention should be directed. In Newcastle-on-Tyne a movement
was set on foot to r