ing, smart, unsympathetic English people. The English, or Anglo-Irish, are in Ireland but not of it. To submit to their slow and steady pressure is undesirable, but they pervade Ireland with their assurance, their monied superiority, their privilege. They stifle even the claims of Ireland. It is only a nature capable of ecstasy like Pearse's that can rise above these sodden commonplaces, and connect himself with "the O'Neills and the O'Donnells." To give the ecstasy a common habiliment he had to prove the English his nation's persecutor and to be shot down after a brief sacrificial hour.

For a few years, beyond doubt, Pearse and MacDonagh and Plunkett had drifted toward this rebellion. In a civilized country they would have found another ideal. They would have been busy thinking and writing on something beyond, or outside, a national plane. But in Ireland they had to choose between a subtle colonial subservience and a monstrous nationalism. They were too gallant not to choose the nationalism. Yeats and Hyde and George Russell set them a certain example. Those men could function, in spite of England. But Pearse and MacDonagh and Plunkett were intensely Catholic and thus close to the tradition of the people. It was part of their fierce loyalty not to find a way out, like Douglas Hyde's non-partisan Gaelic League or Yeats' non-partisan æstheticism or Russell's non-partisan cooperative ideal. They shared the disabilities of being nationalist in their own country too well to wish for a dispensation. It was easy for absentees like Shaw or Oscar Wilde to go to London to become detached and non-national. But cultivated young Catholics, shy and ascetic and

patriotic, had a somewhat different consciousness of the Irish people. Being Catholic, identified these aspiring youths with a mercilessly unremitting nationalism. It forced them, proud and isolated, to dwell with burning zeal on a history tragically their

own.

CYCLOPS

The early days of the Irish Volunteer movement must have been an extraordinary revelation to these young men. No one suspected the latent spirit of militarism in the Catholic part of Ireland. It was unpredictable. But nothing, not the Gaelic League in its most ardent days, brought young Irishmen together so spontaneously and happily as the chance to drill and to train. Under MacNeill, the Belfast vice-president of the Gaelic League, the Volunteers imbibed a real spirit. But the instinct for arms was the marvel. One thinks of the opportunity that Daniel O'Connell, hater of the French Revolution, refused to consider.

Sir Roger Casement, more romantic than Cunninghame-Graham, came into the later organizing. But the first work was done by these younger men. Carson was largely a joke in 1913 in the south of Ireland. Only Catholics who had lived in Belfast could take the Northerns seriously. And never was there acrimony between the Irish and the Ulster Volunteers. It was England, in the end, that figured in the Dubliners' imaginations. They saw that England had shamefully evaded the home rule settlement. Carson had defied the Liberals, Asquith and Loreburn and Churchill had trimmed. Then the war came. After all the trimming, Unionist

and Liberal both looked hungrily at Ireland's manpower. How to take it! The Volunteers saw conscription in the eyes of the politicians. They distrusted Redmond. They came near hating him, better known around Westminster than around the South Circular Road or Rathgar. Conscription more than the war came to decide the rebels' calculations. The formation of the coalition cabinet had a definite effect on their outlook. It seemed to them like the death-knell of home rule, the tocsin of a British unity against Ireland. It had much to do with their desperate resolution to act. The government, in addition, showed that it suspected the Irish Volunteers from the beginning. It hovered over them, waiting to suppress them. What was really a traditional ferment of nationalism until the government discriminated against nationalist gunrunning, became, under provocation, a logical acceptance of death.

When you think of Pearse with his fine school, all his mother's money in it; MacDonagh, father of two young children by whom he was enthralled; Plunkett, with his two young brothers and ambitious to run the Irish Review; Connolly, working at the labor problem for unorganized Dublin - the personal cost of insurrection is seen to have been limitless. But they planned it coolly and deliberately, in every infinite detail. Spied on continually, under the eyes of police and military, they had invaluable aid from girls and women who did much necessary plotting while they and their followers went about their work. The experiences of Garibaldi was one of the models they studied most closely, but they dug out and printed the best of insurrectionary lore. They in

tended, prayed for, hoped for, a paralyzing blow at the established government. They spared no pains to perfect their machine.

English government, put to the test, no more understood them than a Cyclopean giant. It beheld them as utterly mad, dangerous, malignant. It could not forgive them, especially in the week of Kut-elAmara. It went through all the correct forms of field general court-martial, and made haste to shed their blood. One may suppose they were dazed at the despatch of it, the shocking assassin-secrecy. But, whatever their horror, they had bargained for it and they entered with tense wills into a tradition that was sacred in their souls. After Ulster, one may scarcely say that they had no right to distrust English government, but one may blame them for being desperate. One may think of them as dreamers and visionaries. One may wonder if they saw both sides of their alliance with black destruction and death. They took with them hundreds of trusting youths. They sacrificed innocent people. They led out Enniscorthy and Clonmel and Galway to a hopeless attempt to unite. But with all there is to be said against them, there is this to be said for them: they loved Ireland. They knew she was being stifled. They had kept the spark in her alive. They were willing to be human torches in her night.

X

UNEDUCATED IRELAND

THE POWER OF THE PRIESTS

"THE last great fight," a Socialist leader once said

to me,

"will be between the Blacks and the Reds." This was Victor Berger's way of putting his belief that social democracy and the Catholic religion are in fundamental conflict.

The rumors of this conflict are often discussed among the Catholics themselves. In Ireland, which for the most part knows about the world at third hand, one used to hear the darkest accounts of France and Italy. When I was a boy the name of Garibaldi was synonymous with everything wicked and disgusting. I remember the unction with which we were told how the lounging porters in Limerick spat down on Italian sailors who sang of Garibaldi as they unloaded their freight. But it was more common to hear how France had attacked Mother Church, and had "fallen away from the faith." Everything evil that befell France was construed as a visitation from Providence, to be parallelled with the fate of that infamous Cromwellian whose arm was instantly withered as he raised it to smite the Cross over St. Canice's.

of

These convictions as to the sacrilegious character any interference with the church were carried into