ese men
having any complicity with the rebellion. This incident would have
inflamed public opinion in any community; in Ireland its effect was
beyond words poisonous. It revived the atmosphere of the Bachelor's Walk
incident; and there was only too much justification for holding that the
military authorities were indisposed to take the proper disciplinary
action. Its effect detracted from the excellent opinion which the troops
generally had earned by their conduct: it instilled venom into the
resentment of those few cases (and it was beyond hope that they should
not occur) in which soldiers had either lost their heads or yielded to
the temptation of revenge in its ugliest shapes.

The result can be best expressed by recording the experience of one Sinn
Feiner who was captured in the fighting. While the military escort was
taking him through the streets to his place of confinement, a crowd
gathered round and ran along, consisting of angry men and women who had
seen bloodshed and known hunger during these days. They shouted to the
soldiers to knock his brains out there and then. Three weeks later he
was again marched through the streets on his way to an English prison,
and again a crowd mustered. But this time, to his amazement, they were
shouting: "God save you! God have pity on you! Keep your heart up!
Ireland's not dead yet!"

These were the effects produced in Ireland on the mind of common people
by the action of Government in enforcing the ultimate sanction of law
which the members of that same Government by their action and by their
inaction had brought into contempt. In England, in the meanwhile, a new
Military Service Bill was going through the House, and naturally
attempts to include Ireland in its operation were renewed. Sir Edward
Carson, criticizing the Government of Ireland, said that (as Redmond put
it in replying) Nationalists had held the power but not the
responsibility. There was a note of angry protest in the Irish Leader's
rejoinder. "I wish to say for myself that certainly since the Coalition
Government came into operation, and before it, but certainly since then,
I have had no power in the Government of Ireland. All my opinions have
been overborne. My suggestions have been rejected, and my profound
conviction is that if we had had the power and the responsibility for
the Government of our country during the past two years, recent
occurrences in Ireland would never have taken place."

I think that