Who shall say so late in the day what might have checked the growth of this movement? May Sinn Fein have been a distemper which, contracted, must be gone through with? May it have been something altogether different, a coming to rebirth of a people, as the nearly drowned man is brought back to life with pain and tears? Is it that the gods decide such and such a thing shall befall and determine when it shall take place? The Gaelic League went before Sinn Fein like John of old. “After me shall come another mightier than I.” It is sufficient that the movement had a beginning, and like an avalanche gained way as it moved. First, in 1893, the language movement and talk of a Celtic revival. A Dublin professor becomes inspired, and disciples gather about him to master an antique tongue. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in everyday life a pleasant sociable man, is touched with the geist when he pleads for the Gaelic tongue. The movement grows, pen and pencil are snatched up, and the remotest country-side is explored for folklore and fairy tales. There arrives the Celtic illuminator with his paintbrush and his parchment, and the Celtic jeweller, hammering out his brooches old fashioned a thousand years ago. The prophets awaken--the seers of visions, the dreamers of dreams. One dreams of the avatar that is to come, and sees a phantom drummer drumming about the land. A second, reading a telegram of the Russo-Japanese war, receives the intuition that Japan is the masculine pole of the earth and Ireland is the feminine pole, and that some mystic union of the two peoples will bring order into disorder. A third, on Howth Hill, sees bloody giant figures moving across the sky. A fourth, on the top of a tram, sees letters of fire in the heavens. The national fire burning more brightly and more steadily. All the while Arthur Griffith’s paper, _The United Irishman_, calling to the nation to come together. Then, about 1906, the birth of Sinn Fein, in those days not a thing of the sword; but a mild and respectable movement claiming Ireland’s right to develop along her own lines to nationhood. Half a dozen years and this movement making little headway, then 1914, Ulster thwarting Home Rule and the Citizen Army getting itself together; next 1916 and the Easter Week rising. A thousand romantic men strike at Britain in her extremity and rouse her at last. Was that week which followed the Easter rising the time when a pitiless policy might have brought this movement to an end? The general who could ably have struck the blow was in Ireland at the time. The movement was not yet a national matter. A thousand men had stood together in what they believed was a splendid burst of chivalry; but the nation was still impatient of them, thought them a little ridiculous. A hammer was at hand to be used. Had the blow fallen, would this live thing called Sinn Fein have been killed outright?