At their Convention, held in the end of October, Professor MacNeill said: "They would go on with the work of organizing, training and equipping a Volunteer force for the service of Ireland in Ireland, and such a force might yet be the means of saving Home Rule from disaster, and of compelling the Home Rule Government to keep faith with Ireland without the exaction of a price in blood." That forecast has not as yet realized itself; and many of us think that the chief achievement of this section has been to turn to waste a heavy price that was paid in blood by other men for the sake of Ireland.

But unquestionably they were, though the minority, far more of a living reality than the mass of the original force--and for a simple reason.
Their purpose, whether good or bad, was within their own control.

The purpose of the majority was to carry out Redmond's policy--which was to make the Volunteers part of an Irish army of which the striking force was designed to defend Ireland on the battlefields of Flanders.

But to carry out that policy the National Volunteers must be accepted as a purely local Irish military organization for home defence--controlled, in the absence of a popularly elected Irish Government, by the elected Irish representatives.

The War Office thwarted that policy.