t merely as
a conquered race: mercy they might have, rights they would have
forfeited by conquest.

Had such a course been followed, there would not only have been an
opportunity upon the part of the nation at large to disown the usurpers,
who would then have had not even the vestige of a grievance upon which
to establish their preposterous claims to continuance in the position
they had taken up.

In a word, the English would have made fools of them, or rather allowed
the Irish to make fools of them. Instead of this, all the old fatal,
discredited methods were employed with the same fatal results, and they
became national heroes, whose suppression by force could only give them
greater power.

The whole thing would have taken no longer than the campaign; no further
blood would have been spilt, and time would have been allowed for the
great adventure to reveal itself in the true grotesqueness of cold
reality.

Possibly it was looked upon as _infra dig._ to treat with rebels, but it
was so obviously a mental case that it is hard to see how anything could
possibly have been _infra dig._ under such circumstances.

On Monday and Tuesday the Republic was no more representative of the
people of Ireland than the tailors of Tooley Street were the people of
England, but upon the old Grecian principle that the sufferings of one
citizen are the sufferings of the whole State, it became national from
the moment the national sentiment had been aroused by the indiscriminate
shedding of blood.

It was in their defeat that the Sinn Feiners won their great victory,
and they knew it. They had been scoffed at, derided, denounced by the
official party almost to--in fact, actually to--a state of desperation,
and an act of despair became their last resort. The Statute Book indeed
proclaimed Ireland a nation once again, but the Government treated
Ireland more like a province than ever, and her own representatives
seemed to acquiesce; so, as Mrs. Pearse, the mother of the "President,"
told me afterwards, "there was nothing left for them but to accomplish
the sacrifice demanded to save the soul of Ireland and proclaim her on
the scaffold once again unconquered and unconquerable."

It was an act of folly, if you like, to try to set up a republic,
especially during such a crisis as this war, but since the death of the
leaders brought out their true character, it has ceased to be looked
upon as a piece of knavery, for these men, according to