ich, whether it is right
or wrong, has but a secondary and indirect interest for them.

"I am, dear sir,
"Your obedient servant,
"-|- EDWARD THOMAS,
"Bishop of Limerick.
"_November 10, 1915._"

The seditious Press took up the cry: "Conscription had not even been
applied to her own sons, yet England was applying it to Irishmen," said
Gilbert Galbraith in _Honesty_; adding: "for all she wants of Irishmen
is their lives that she might live," and he warned Irishmen that "she
(England) who took everything they had and stripped them naked and left
them like Christ to the ribald jest and sneer of the rabble in the
world's back-streets, would, like every bully, try to have revenge when
she got them by themselves."

Had this been mere verbal sword-play, however, I should not quote it; it
was more: it was the taking up of the challenge of cowardice.

"Will you in God's name get ready to answer her?" concluded the famous
article in which he appealed to these would-be exiles repatriated by
force; "because, if you want to, all you have to do is to get into touch
with the nearest corps of Irish Volunteers." They would give them
instructions, he added pointedly, how to act, and what they did they had
better do quickly, for it might be too late on the morrow.

Could one be surprised, I ask, if some of these would-be emigrants
answered the taunt gun in hand?--especially when men like Captain White,
who was afterwards to try to rouse the South Wales miners to endeavour
to save Connolly, was telling them plainly:--

"You are fast being led into industrial slavery. You know it, and I am
apprehensive and angry, but too bewildered to move. To rob you of your
right over your own poor bodies is the workers' tyrant. To rob you of
your sovereign power over your own will is the workers' devil.

"Awake, brothers, before your liberty is dead. Arm yourselves against
your real enemies. Say to the tyrants and their agents, 'The first man
who lays hands on me against my will dies.'"

All this, I say, jumps to the eyes of anyone perusing the literature
that produced the rising.

It is beside the point whether such argumentation be true or false,
patriotic or seditious. The only point, as far as we are concerned in
this quasi-medical diagnosis of diseased mentality, is whether or not
these thoughts were present in the psychology of the combatant