her were being killed or maimed by
scores of thousands in a supreme effort to stay the advance of the Boche
to Paris and the sea.

It happened that on the very day when the Report of the Convention was
laid on the table of the House of Commons, the Prime Minister made a
statement of profound gravity, beginning with words such as the British
Parliament can never before have been compelled to hear from the lips of
the head of the Government. For the moment, said Mr. Lloyd George, there
was a lull in the storm; but more attacks were to come, and--

The "fate of the Empire, the fate of Europe, and the fate of
liberty throughout the world may depend on the success with which
the very last of these attacks is resisted and countered."

Mr. Asquith struck the same note, urging the House--

"With all the earnestness and with all the solemnity of which I am
capable, to realise that never before in the experience of any man
within these walls, or of his fathers and his forefathers, has this
country and all the great traditions and ideals which are embodied
in our history--never has this, the most splendid inheritance ever
bequeathed to a people, been in greater peril, or in more need of
united safeguarding than at this present time."

Not Demosthenes himself, in his most impassioned appeal to the
Athenians, more fitly matched moving words to urgent occasion than these
two statesmen in the simple, restrained sentences, in which they warned
the Commons of the peril hanging over England.

But was eloquent persuasion really required at such a moment to still
the voice of faction in the British House of Commons? Let those who
would assume the negative study the official Parliamentary Report of the
debate on the 9th of April, 1918. They will find a record which no loyal
Irishman will ever be able to read without a tingling sense of shame.
The whole body of members, with one exception, listened to the Prime
Minister's grave words in silence touched with awe, feeling that perhaps
they were sitting there on the eve of the greatest tragedy in their
country's history. The single exception was the Nationalist Party. From
those same benches whence arose nineteen years back the never-forgotten
cheers that greeted the tale of British disaster in South Africa, now
came a shower of snarling interruptions that broke persistently into the
Prime Minister's speech, and with angry menace impeded hi