feeble jokes
about "wooden guns" and "making a free ring"--as if it were to be
only an ordinary pugilistic encounter and of no account. In 1913 the
Ulster Volunteer Force was said to be well armed and probably better
drilled than the northern regiments at the outbreak of the American
War of Secession.

Official nationalism was, though it knew it not, passing through the
gates of disaster. It was still able to maintain its hold on the old
stagers who were grafted on to it for various reasons, and the Board
of Erin was still able to count on the fidelity of those who believed
in the secret sign and watchword as the avenue to place and
preferment.

The Government of Ireland Bill was merrily pursuing its three years'
course through Parliament--passed by the House of Commons and rejected
by the House of Lords after the usual farce and formality of debates
which had very little reality in them. What counted was that Ulster
was in arms and determined to resist and that "the Home Rule
Government" had proved themselves incapable either of conceding or of
resisting. Other things began to count also in Ireland. The young
manhood of Nationalist Ireland, seeing the liberties of their country
menaced by force, decided to organise themselves into a corps of Irish
Volunteers to defend these liberties from wanton aggression. The
Transport Workers' Strike in Dublin, in 1913, under Mr James Larkin,
also showed the existence of a powerful body of organised opinion,
which cared little for ordinary political methods and which was
clearly disaffected to the Party leaders. Forces were being loosed
that had long been held in check by the power of the place-hunting and
sectarian "constitutional" movement asserting and enforcing its
authority, through unscrupulous methods already described, to speak
and act on behalf of the people. If Sir Edward Carson had risen to
power through open and flagrant defiance of all constituted right and
authority, there were others who were not slow to copy his methods.
The Irish Party may denounce him in Parliament as a disloyal subject
of the Crown, but there were young Nationalists in Southern Ireland,
aye, even in Rebel Cork, who sincerely raised cheers for him because
he had shown them, as they believed, the better way "to save Ireland."
The Government could not make one law for the North and another for
the South. If it allowed the Orangemen to drill and arm it could not
well interfere with the Nationalist