rovision made for them by the War Office, and by about the middle
of October the Protestant districts had furnished some 21,000, of
which Belfast alone had contributed 7,581, or 305 per 10,000 of the
population--the highest proportion of all the towns in the United
Kingdom."[91]

The second witness is the democratic orator who took a foremost part in
the House of Commons in denouncing the Curragh officers who resigned
their Commissions rather than march against Ulster. Colonel John Ward,
M.P., writing two years after the war, in which he had not kept his eyes
shut, said:

"It would be presumptuous for a mere Englishman to praise the
gallantry and patriotism of Scotland, Wales, and Ulster; their
record stands second to none in the annals of the war. The case of
the South of Ireland, her most ardent admirer will admit, is not
as any other in the whole British Empire. To the everlasting credit
of the great leader of the Irish Nationalists, Mr. John Redmond,
his gallant son, and his very lovable brother--together with many
real, great-souled Irish soldiers whose loss we so deeply
deplore--saw the light and followed the only course open to good
men and true. But the patriotism and devotion of the few only show
up in greater and more exaggerated contrast the sullen indifference
of the majority, and the active hostility of the minority, who
would have seen our country and its people overrun and defeated not
only without regret, but with fiendish delight."[92]

No generous-minded Ulsterman would wish to detract a word from the
tribute paid by Colonel Ward to the Redmond family and other gallant
Catholic Nationalists who stood manfully for the Empire in the day of
trial; but the concluding sentence in the above quotation cannot be
gainsaid. And the pathetic thing was that Mr. Redmond himself never
seems to have understood the true sentiments of the majority of those
who had been his followers before the war. In a speech in the House on
the 15th of September he referred contemptuously to a "little group of
men who never belonged to the National Constitutional party, who were
circulating anti-recruiting handbills and were publishing little
wretched rags once a week or once a month," which were not worth a
moment's notice.

The near future was to show that these adherents of Sinn Fein were not
so negligible as Mr. Redmond sincerely believe