This was a development which Redmond on his part neither willed nor
approved, yet one which in the circumstances was inevitable. Who could
suppose that the formation of combatant forces would remain a monopoly
of any party? There was no mistaking the weight which a hundred thousand
Ulster Volunteers, drilled and regimented, threw into Sir Edward
Carson's advocacy. As early as September 1913, during the parliamentary
recess, Redmond received at least one letter--and possibly he received
many--urging him to raise the standard of a similar force, and pointing
out that if he did not take this course it might be taken by others less
fit to guide it. The letter of which I speak elicited no answer. It was
never his habit to reply to inconvenient communications--a policy which
he inherited from Parnell, who held that nearly every letter answered
itself within six months, if it were let alone. Certainly in this case
it so happened. Long before six months were up, facts had made argument
superfluous.

Wisdom is easy after the event, and few would dispute now that the
constitutional party ought either to have dissociated itself completely
from the appeal to force, or to have launched and controlled it from the
outset. Neither of these lines was followed, and the responsibility for
what was done and what was not done must lie with Redmond. Yet, as I
read it, the key to his policy lay in a dread, not of war, but of civil
war. To arm Irishmen against each other was of all possible courses to
him the most hateful. It opened a vision of fratricidal strife, of an
Ireland divided against itself by new and bloody memories.

Moreover, though he had, as the world came to know, soldiering in his
blood--though the call to war, when he counted the war righteous,
stirred what was deepest in him--by training and conviction he was