Meanwhile the activities of the Irish Volunteers continued. The secession after the dispute with Mr. Redmond had withdrawn a large majority of their original numbers: indeed some authorities go so far as to say that immediately after the formation of the National Volunteers, the original committee could not count upon a following of more than 10,000 or 12,000 men. Be this as it may, the arrest and deportation of several of their organizers, the constant supervision over their proceedings exercised by the police authorities and the sure drift of Nationalist opinion away from the Parliamentarians and their policy, not (it is true) so marked then as to cause serious official misgiving, tended to increase their prestige and popularity. The funds had for the most part gone with the National Volunteers, but the Irish in America, who sided not with Mr. Redmond but with the Irish Volunteers, supplied large sums of money for equipment and organization. The report of the Second Annual Convention held in November, 1915, contains a speech by the President on the history and aims of the movement which concluded: "Further I will only say that we ought all to adhere faithfully and strictly to the objects, the constitution and the policy which we have adopted. We will not be diverted from our work by tactics of provocation. We will not give way to irritation or excitement. Our business is not to make a show or indulge in demonstrations. We started out on a course of constructive work requiring a long period of patient and tenacious exertion. When things were going most easily for us, I never shrank from telling my comrades that success might require years of steady perseverance--a prospect sometimes harder to face than an enemy in the field.... Great progress has been made, more must be made. The one thing we must look to is that there shall be no stopping and no turning back." There were at this time over 200 corps of the Irish Volunteers in active training and the movement was spreading, if not rapidly, yet quietly and surely. The leaders waited for time to do its work, to bring fully home to Irish Nationalists the difference between a policy in which the necessities of Empire held the first place and one in which the claims of Ireland were supreme: meanwhile it was intended that the Volunteers should act as "a national defence force for Ireland, for all Ireland and for Ireland only," ready to ward off any assault upon Irish liberty, but resolved not to provoke or to invite attack.