a
repetition of Ireland.

"We have made every mistake we could possibly make as a ruling race in
our government of you Irish," he said to me, "and we cannot, as we love
and wish to keep our Empire, continue to perpetuate them.

"We can keep Ireland down if we like by force of arms, but we shall
never be able to keep our Empire by the same means, and that is why it
is so important that with such an object-lesson at our very doors we
should be ever prepared to study how conquered or incorporated nations
look upon our rule.

"That rule may be a protection, and it should be, but our stupidity can
make it a yoke; yet of this we can be certain, that what fails to win
friendship and respect in Ireland will fail to win security for our
Empire when we employ those methods on nations who have it in their
power to say us nay."

In other words, as long as the suppression has only been a military
suppression it has been no suppression at all; any more than a delirious
patient who is drugged or held down by force by a couple of hospital
porters is cured by that expedient.

Moreover, all such expedients are necessarily merely temporary, and what
we want to get at are the root causes of the complaint.

We must therefore fully diagnose those grievances of which the rebellion
was only the outward symptom, and against which the Republic was more,
after all, a symbolic protest than anything else; it was no more really
intended to establish a Celtic Commonwealth than Sir Edward Carson's
army was to change a Province into a Kingdom. Both were _facons de
parler_, and the word "provisional" saved them from ridicule they would
otherwise have deserved.

I remember speaking to a prominent Sinn Feiner only a couple of days
before the revolt with a view to writing an article on the Volunteers,
and this is what he said:--

"It would be very difficult for anyone to write anything just at
present, for things are trembling in the balance. There is a most
tremendous battle going on at the present moment at the Castle, we
understand, between General Friend and Augustine Birrell--in other
words, between the military and the civil authorities--and everything
depends upon that issue.

"They want to take away our arms, for example, and not those of Redmond
or Carson, and the latter will stand by and see it done without a word;
but we know that's only the thin end of the wedge of the complete
subjugation of Ireland to the soldier, as in the days