_, part of a gigantic game of bluff.

In a world organized as was Europe in 1914 on the basis of universal
military service, it is dangerous, not only materially but morally and
intellectually, to be as the people of these islands were, segregated
from all military experience. We were almost like children in a magazine
of explosives: we knew, of course, that there were dangerous substances
about us; but we did not realize how suddenly and irretrievably the
whole thing might go off.

I do not know how Redmond gauged the situation. But he spent the end of
the week in town, and must have been less unprepared than was one like
myself, who during the Saturday, Sunday and the Monday Bank Holiday was
away in a most peaceful country-side, remote from news. Even on the
Tuesday, the instant bearing on our own questions and our own lives of
what we read in the newspapers was not clear to me. There was to be a
debate, of course; but only when I saw the attendants setting chairs on
the floor of the House itself--a thing which had not been done since
Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill--did I grasp the fact
that something wholly unusual was expected.

My strong impression is that the House as a whole was in great measure
unprepared for what it had to face. You could feel surprise in the air
as Sir Edward Grey developed his wonderful speech. Men, shaken away from
all traditional attitudes, responded from the depths of themselves to an
appeal which none of us had ever heard before.

Having failed to secure my place on the Irish benches, I was sitting on
one of the chairs close by the Sergeant at Arms, just inside the bar of
the House, so that I saw at once both sides of the assembly: there were
no parties that day. The Foreign Secretary's speech, intensely English,
with all the quality that is finest in English tradition, clearly did
not in its opening stages carry the House as a whole. Passages struck
home, here and there, to men not to parties, kindling individual
sentiments. Appeal to a common feeling for France did not elicit a
general response; but here and there in every quarter there were those
who leapt to their feet and cheered, waving the papers that were in
their hands; and the two figures that stand out most vividly in my
recollection were Willie Redmond, our leader's brother, and Arthur
Lynch. We were in a very different atmosphere already from the days of
the Boer War.

It was not until the speaker reached