The Sinn Fein policy is not a policy that could be made effective by a minority, though even a minority, determined and well led, could make it felt: but if adopted by the majority of the Irish people there is no doubt of its effectiveness. It would make government impossible: for it must always be remembered that in modern times a subject nation remains a subject nation only because it accepts, in some way or other, its government. A nation which will resolutely and unitedly, on the lines of the Sinn Fein policy, ignore its Government and proceed to the formation of a voluntary (so to speak) Government, would force the occupying power either to give in or to provide an armed guard for every unit of the subject nation. And, as a matter of historical fact, it was the unconscious application of the Sinn Fein policy that originated all the remedial legislation of the nineteenth century. The Catholic Association of O'Connell, for instance, was practically a Sinn Fein Association, and the records and memoirs of that time show that it had made the ordinary government of Ireland a nullity, and that it forced the Emancipation Act. But when Ireland accepted the Emancipation Act and recognised the Act of Union the process of degeneration set in. CHAPTER V ARTHUR GRIFFITH--THE TRUTH A small man, very sturdily built, nothing remarkable about his appearance except his eyes, which are impenetrable and steely, taciturn, deliberate, speaking when he does speak with the authority and the finality of genius, totally without rhetoric, under complete self-control, and the coolest and best brain in Ireland.