them to enlist for service overseas the inevitable crisis was provoked. But the original provisional committee were now in a minority in the counsels of the organization they had founded, and they were hampered by a fundamental (and, indeed, intentional) ambiguity in the Volunteer pledge. "The rights and liberties common to all Irishmen" was not a phrase which carried its interpretation on its face. It was open to the Volunteer followers of Mr. Redmond to say that the democracy of Great Britain had conferred upon Ireland a "charter of liberty" and that it was the duty of Irishmen to fight for Great Britain, keeping faith with those who had kept faith with them. It was open to others to say that "the Thing on the Statute Book" fell far short of conferring upon Irishmen the rights and liberties to which they were entitled, and that the duty to secure first that to which they were entitled precluded them from the prior performance of any other task. The members of the original committee who took the latter view could also urge that Mr. Redmond's original pledge that the Volunteers would "defend the shores of Ireland" was not capable of the gloss that "the shores of Ireland" under the circumstances was a legitimate figure of speech for the trenches in the front line in France. The difference of interpretation developed into a split. The members of the original committee met in September and called a Volunteer Convention for November 25, 1914, at which it was decided "to declare that Ireland cannot with honour or safety take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a National Government of her own; and to repudiate the claim of any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the services of the British Empire while no National Government which could act and speak for the people of Ireland is allowed to exist." Before the split the Volunteers had numbered about 150,000; and it would appear that the great majority of these at first sided with Mr. Redmond. Many of them enlisted: many of them, under the title of the National Volunteers, continued to exist as a separate body in Ireland: some at least of them afterwards found their way back into the ranks of the Irish Volunteers.