Some of Redmond's colleagues held that they had been "extreme men" all their lives, and they thought it too hard that they should be expected to ask Irishmen to join the English Army.

Yet these same men would have worked enthusiastically for the Volunteers, and by sympathy for their comrades who went out could have been led into a very different attitude.
Many of them, too, felt an honourable scruple about asking others to do what they could not do themselves.

As a parliamentary group we were under a singular disability.

In its early days the Irish party had been, what Sinn Fein is now, a party of the young.

But so strong was the tie of gratitude that service in its ranks became an inheritance, and in most cases a man once elected stayed on till he died or resigned.