The most serious cause of it was the line taken by General Parsons about the appointment of officers.  He laid down a rule, which I think would have had excellent results if enforced throughout the whole of the new armies, that no man should be recommended for a commission without previous military experience, and that candidates lacking that experience must put in a period of service in the ranks.  He set apart a special company in one battalion, the 7th Leinsters, to which such men should be sent, so that while drilling and exercising with the rest of the battalion, and enjoying no special privilege, they ate and slept and lived together in their own barrack rooms.

Yet the obstacle thus set up deterred a good many of the less zealous, who could not understand why that should be made a condition in the Irish Division which was not so in the Ulster Division—­nor, indeed, so far as I know, anywhere else at that time.  Men who had been officers of Ulster Volunteers got their commissions as a matter of course; the officer of National Volunteers had to prove his competence in the cadet company.  General Parsons fully admitted this difference of treatment, and justified it by saying to Redmond that in consequence of it he would be very sorry to change officers with the Ulster Division.  One cannot refuse to admire such a spirit; but he ought to have asked himself whether it was fair to impose a handicap on Redmond’s efforts.  Everything turned on getting representative young men from the Volunteers, and from the correspondence it appears that few were coming from the South and West.  From the North they poured in.  In our 47th Brigade, the 6th Royal Irish Regiment was mainly composed of Derry Nationalists; the 7th Leinsters and the 6th Connaught Rangers were almost to a man followers of Mr. Devlin from Belfast.

Next after Redmond, Mr. Devlin was the man to whom our Division owed most.  But the first and the main impetus came from Redmond himself.  He spoke on October 4th at Wexford, the capital of his native county; on the 11th at Waterford, his own constituency; on the 18th at Kilkenny, the constituency of his close friend Pat O’Brien.  A week later he was at Belfast and in the glens of Antrim, among the Nationalists of Ulster.  Then Parliament kept him for a few weeks; in December he was back, and spoke at Tuam and in Limerick.  Everywhere the Volunteers turned out in great numbers to receive him; and to them his appeal was primarily addressed.

At Wexford he laid stress on Mr. Asquith’s pledge that the Volunteers should remain as a recognized permanent force for the defence of the country, and this led him to raise frankly the question of control.  Who should have authority over Volunteers in a State?  Surely the elected and responsible government.  But pending Home Rule, “the policy and control of the Volunteers must rest with the elected representatives of the country.”

More generally, he reminded them that he had always spoken of the possibility of some great political convulsion that might destroy their plans.  “Nothing but an earthquake can now prevent Home Rule,” he had said.  “The outbreak of this overwhelming war might easily have overwhelmed Home Rule.  But we have survived it.”