Finally, if these failed and the people of Ireland really wished for war in its full reality, they could have it, but they must not ever afterward appeal as constitutional partners in the Empire, but merely as a conquered race: mercy they might have, rights they would have forfeited by conquest. Had such a course been followed, there would not only have been an opportunity upon the part of the nation at large to disown the usurpers, who would then have had not even the vestige of a grievance upon which to establish their preposterous claims to continuance in the position they had taken up. In a word, the English would have made fools of them, or rather allowed the Irish to make fools of them. Instead of this, all the old fatal, discredited methods were employed with the same fatal results, and they became national heroes, whose suppression by force could only give them greater power. The whole thing would have taken no longer than the campaign; no further blood would have been spilt, and time would have been allowed for the great adventure to reveal itself in the true grotesqueness of cold reality. Possibly it was looked upon as _infra dig._ to treat with rebels, but it was so obviously a mental case that it is hard to see how anything could possibly have been _infra dig._ under such circumstances. On Monday and Tuesday the Republic was no more representative of the people of Ireland than the tailors of Tooley Street were the people of England, but upon the old Grecian principle that the sufferings of one citizen are the sufferings of the whole State, it became national from the moment the national sentiment had been aroused by the indiscriminate shedding of blood. It was in their defeat that the Sinn Feiners won their great victory, and they knew it. They had been scoffed at, derided, denounced by the official party almost to--in fact, actually to--a state of desperation, and an act of despair became their last resort. The Statute Book indeed proclaimed Ireland a nation once again, but the Government treated Ireland more like a province than ever, and her own representatives seemed to acquiesce; so, as Mrs. Pearse, the mother of the "President," told me afterwards, "there was nothing left for them but to accomplish the sacrifice demanded to save the soul of Ireland and proclaim her on the scaffold once again unconquered and unconquerable." It was an act of folly, if you like, to try to set up a republic, especially during such a crisis as this war, but since the death of the leaders brought out their true character, it has ceased to be looked upon as a piece of knavery, for these men, according to all accounts of the priests, died the death of saints, not scoundrels; so that we now realize the old, old story of the tragedy of misunderstanding, as much, indeed, by their own countrymen as by the Englishman.