Those whom he brought with him into the pass of danger were few, but they were touched with his own spirit; and even the very recklessness of their act touched the popular imagination.

Irish regiments, after all, could do only what other regiments were doing; their deeds were obscured in a chaos of war from which individual prowess could not emerge.

Pearse and his associates offered to Irishmen a stage for themselves on which they could and did secure full personal recognition--the complete attention of Ireland's mind.
All this would have seemed vanity to Redmond's solid, positive intelligence--vanity in all senses of the word.

It would have moved him to nothing but angry contempt--anger against the spirit which was prepared to divide Ireland's effort, contempt for the futility of the reasoning.

But one aspect of the rising dominated all the others in his mind.