endence to play his part
in this new act of the Irish drama.

The Government had many warnings of what was brewing. But Mr. Birrell,
the Chief Secretary, who in frivolity seemed a contemporary embodiment
of Nero, deemed cheap wit a sufficient reply to all remonstrances, and
had to confess afterwards that he had utterly miscalculated the forces
with which he had to deal. He was completely taken by surprise when, on
the 20th of April, an attempt to land weapons from a German vessel,
escorted by a submarine from which Sir Roger Casement landed in the West
of Ireland, proved that the Irish rebels were in league with the enemy;
and even after this ominous event, he did nothing to provide against the
outbreak that occurred in Dublin four days later. The rising in the
capital, and in several other places in the South of Ireland, was not
got under for a week, during which time more than 170 houses had been
burnt, L2,000,000 sterling worth of property destroyed or damaged, and
1,315 casualties had been suffered, of which 304 were fatal.

The aims of the insurgents were disclosed in a proclamation which
referred to the administration in Ireland as a "long usurpation by a
foreign people and government." It declared that the Irish Republican
Brotherhood--the same organisation that planned and carried out the
Phoenix Park murders in 1882--had now seized the right moment for
"reviving the old traditions of Irish nationhood," and announced that
the new Irish Republic was a sovereign independent State, which was
entitled to claim the allegiance of every Irish man and woman.

The rebellion was the subject of debates in both Houses of Parliament on
the 10th and 11th of May--Mr. Birrell having in the interval, to use a
phrase of Carlyle's, "taken himself and his incompetence
elsewhere"--when Mr. Dillon, speaking for the Nationalist Party, poured
forth a flood of passionate sympathy with the rebels, declaring that he
was proud of youths who could boast of having slaughtered British
soldiers, and he denounced the Government for suppressing the rising in
"a sea of blood." The actual fact was, that out of a large number of
prisoners taken red-handed in the act of armed rebellion who were
condemned to death after trial by court-martial, the great majority were
reprieved, and thirteen in all were executed. Whether such measures
deserved the frightful description coined by Mr. Dillon's flamboyant
rhetoric everybody can judge for himself, after