More than that, the political organization of which he was head had inculcated an attitude of aloofness from the Army because it was the Army which held Ireland by force.

Enlistment had been discouraged, on the principle that from a military point of view Ireland was regarded as a conquered country.

A test case had arisen over the Territorial Act, which was not extended to Ireland, any more than the Volunteer Acts had been.

We had voted against Lord Haldane's Bill on the express ground that it put Ireland into this status of inferiority and withheld from Irishmen that right to arm and drill which was pressed upon Englishmen as a patriotic duty.

We had explicitly declared then in 1907 that our influence should and must be used against enlistment.
These facts of history had not merely produced in Ireland an attitude of mind hostile to the idea, so to say, of the British Army as an institution, though the individual soldier had always been at least as popular as anyone else.