uch step was
taken. No attempt was made to enlist Nationalists of position as patrons
of the recruiting campaign. In Catholic Nationalist districts it was the
rule rather than the exception to select gentlemen of the Protestant
Church, and of strong Unionist opinions, as recruiting officers. If
Catholic Nationalists had been selected as the official agents to assist
in raising the Ulster Division, there would have been an outcry, and
very rightly; it would have been contrary to common sense. But the War
Office, always even obsequiously ready to consider the Ulstermen's point
of view, completely lacked sympathy for that of the majority in Ireland.
In some cases the choice of a man locally unpopular on public grounds
afforded--to speak plainly--an excuse for those leading Nationalists
who were loath to depart from all the tradition of their lifetime. Some
of Redmond's colleagues held that they had been "extreme men" all their
lives, and they thought it too hard that they should be expected to ask
Irishmen to join the English Army. Yet these same men would have worked
enthusiastically for the Volunteers, and by sympathy for their comrades
who went out could have been led into a very different attitude.

Many of them, too, felt an honourable scruple about asking others to do
what they could not do themselves. As a parliamentary group we were
under a singular disability. In its early days the Irish party had been,
what Sinn Fein is now, a party of the young. But so strong was the tie
of gratitude that service in its ranks became an inheritance, and in
most cases a man once elected stayed on till he died or resigned. By
1914, of all parties in the House we had by far the largest proportion
of men over military age. I question whether three out of the seventy
could have passed the standard then exacted--for two or three of the
younger men were medically unfit. In these circumstances the War Office
would have been well advised to waive a regulation or two to facilitate
matters; but the rigour of the rules was maintained. One of my
colleagues, a man in the early forties, offered to join as a private; he
was refused. In my own case a similar refusal was based on Lord
Kitchener's personal opinion against that of the Under-secretary for
War, to whom, as a personal friend, I had written; it took nearly six
months to get the decision altered; and by that time the value of
example was much depreciated. The beginning was the chance to g