of Cromwell, and
even if we stand alone we will stop that.

"They don't half of them know a tenth of our power; even people in
Ireland don't realize it. We are completely organized and perfectly
equipped, far better even than the Ulster Volunteers are, and they will
find out their mistake when they try.

"They've made two attempts already, in a hole-and-corner sort of way, at
the Gaelic Press and at Liberty Hall, and the police found themselves
looking into the barrels of revolvers each time. Well, all I can say is,
when the day comes and they determine to strike--and we'll get wind of
it--you may depend upon it the whole world will get a surprise; it will
be like nothing else in Irish history for seven hundred years.

"We have our supplies at regular intervals, and our local commanders,
with each province fully organized under them, and a complete system of
code messages which never go through the post, but are distributed by
means of secret dispatch-riders, and if the signal went forth to-night,
to-morrow morning the whole of Ireland would be up in arms."

All of which, I need hardly say, I took--as everyone in my place would
have taken it--_cum grano salis_, but it all came back to me the moment
I heard the first shot. Especially did it flash across my mind when,
bringing back to Dun's Hospital a dead Sinn Feiner, the famous document
fell out of his pocket, which is strikingly similar in thought to my
friend's prognostications.

According to Alderman Kelly, speaking on the Thursday before the
outbreak in the Dublin Corporation, some such order had been "recently
addressed to and was on the files of Dublin Castle," according to which
the arrest of all the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, together with the
members of the Sinn Fein Council, the Executive Committee of the
National (Redmondite) Volunteers, and the Executive Committee of the
Gaelic League, had been sanctioned.

Probably, however, the best diagnosis of the situation immediately
preceding the outbreak was the letter published by the _New Statesman_
of May 6th, that had been written as early as April 7th, and which,
coming from the most eminent victim of the danger so clearly foreseen by
him, must have special force at the present moment.

It was from no less than F. Sheehy Skeffington.

"SIR,--The situation in Ireland is extremely grave. Thanks to the
silence of the daily Press, the military authorities are pursuing their
Prussian plans in Ireland