nvicted felon. He was
forcibly fed and died under the process, owing to heart-failure. Redmond
told me with fury how he had urged again and again on the Chief
Secretary the possibility of some such calamity, and had urged that
these men should receive the treatment proper in any case to political
prisoners, but above all to men who had been neither convicted nor
tried.

The result was immediately seen in some hostile demonstrations in Cork,
chiefly against Mr. Devlin and Redmond. But this was only the beginning.
On the following Sunday the body of the dead man, Thomas Ashe, was
carried through the streets of Dublin at the head of a vast procession,
in which large bodies of Volunteers, openly defying Government's
proclamation, marched in uniform; and he was buried with military
honours and volleys fired over his grave. With all this breach of the
law Government dared not interfere. They had put themselves in the
wrong; whether they prevented the demonstration or permitted it,
mischief was bound to follow. A new incitement was given to the
enthusiasm for Sinn Fein, a new martyr was provided, and new hostility
was raised against the Convention, for whose success Government was
notoriously anxious. On the other hand, Ulster Unionist opinion was
violently offended; they were scandalized by the disregard for law and
the impotence of constitutional authority. This attitude, however open
to comments based on their own recent history, did not render them any
easier to deal with. Above all, the Ashe incident emphasized the
presence in Ireland of a great force over which Redmond had no control
and which had no representative in the Convention. How, men asked, even
if a bargain could be made with Constitutional Nationalists, should that
covenant be carried into effect?

III

The Cork visit marks the close of the first stage in the history of the
Convention. At the opening of our session there it was decided to
appoint a Grand Committee of twenty, whose task should be, "if possible,
to prepare a scheme for submission to the Convention, which would meet
the views and difficulties expressed by the different speeches during
the course of the debate." The Convention itself, after its
deliberations of that week, would adjourn until the Committee was in a
position to report. This second stage, purely of committee work, was to
last much longer than anyone anticipated: the Convention did not
reassemble till the week before Christmas.