ernment also passed a suspensory act, holding it up for a year, or longer, if so ordered by the Government at the end of the year; and they also declared that they would not in any circumstance "coerce Ulster." With the "home rule for three-quarters of Ireland" in the form of a scrap of paper, Mr. Redmond tried to induce his followers to join the army. The immediate result was a split in the Irish Volunteers. The founders of the Volunteers, who had accepted Redmondite co-operation on the committee so long as no recruiting plank was adopted, now expelled the Redmondite nominees from the committee, seized the Volunteer offices in Kildare street, Dublin, barricaded and garrisoned them, and prepared to hold them against all comers. The Redmondite portion formed a new body, the "National Volunteers," who never troubled much about drilling or arming, but were, and are, merely a branch of the Redmondite political machine. Their devotion to their leader, however, did not go so far as to induce them to follow his advice and enter the English army, as was shown when 30,000 of them paraded before Mr. Redmond last Easter (1915), men who, if they had taken Mr. Redmond's words seriously, ought to have been in Flanders or at the Dardanelles.
Much confusion was introduced into the Irish situation by the case of Belgium, and by the unscrupulous use made by the English recruiting agencies of Ireland's traditional and historic sympathy with that country and with France. Catholic Ireland must fight to save Catholic Belgium, was the cry. We countered that by asking why should we not fight for Catholic Galicia, which was then in possession of the anti-Catholic Russians. Mr. Ginnell, the only Irish member of Parliament who is not attached to any political machine, and also the only one who opposes recruiting, has repeatedly asked the Government to bring pressure to bear on its Russian allies, with a view to getting for the Cardinal Archbishop of Lemberg as good treatment as that accorded by the Germans to Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin; but the Government has decided that it would not be proper to "interfere with the internal affairs of our ally."
Louvain was the recruiters' trump-card. "Remember," the Irish were adjured, "that your priests went to Louvain to be educated when they could not get educated in their own land." Some one with an inconvenient historical memory replied by a reminder that it was English persecution that prevented Catholic priests from getting education in Ireland and compelled them to go to Louvain. Similar
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