This subject was now worn out; but Home Rule was entering a new phase. A Provisional Committee, mainly self-elected, was about to devise a constitution and appoint leaders for the Irish Volunteers (A.R., 1913, p. 267). The Nationalist leaders felt, like Sir Edward Carson in Ulster, that the force must not continue uncontrolled; and Mr. Redmond (June 9) issued a statement announcing that his party, which had thought the movement premature, had been converted by the events at the Curragh and the gun-running in Ulster, and for the past six weeks had given it their support. Since then it had "spread like a prairie fire"; and he suggested that the existing Provisional Committee should be immediately strengthened by the addition of twenty-five representatives nominated by the Nationalist party and in sympathy with its policy and aims. The reorganisation might then be completed, and a Conference might elect the permanent governing body. This proposal was not at once accepted by the Provisional Committee; and on June 12 Mr. Redmond issued a further manifesto, urging the Nationalists--who were 95 per cent of the force, though only a minority of the Provisional Committee--to organise county committees independent of that body. The Nationalist party, he warned the Committee, would not submit to dictation on questions of policy. The members of "Sinn Fein" and other advanced Irish patriots resented this interference, and Unionist spectators did their best to promote a breach. But the local leaders generally saw that the union was necessary, and therefore favoured Mr. Redmond's intervention. The combination of the Volunteer and the Nationalist forces tended necessarily to strengthen the influences at work in Ireland, both against the exclusion of Ulster and for the revocation of the prohibition of the import of arms (p. 66), of which the validity had been upheld (June 15) on appeal by the Dublin Court of King's Bench, though only by two Judges to one.