It used to be no uncommon sight in Dublin to see a tram-car held up by Auxiliaries and searched with no result. Before the Auxiliaries had boarded the tram, the gunmen would openly pass their pistols to girls sitting beside them. Any one giving information would never have left that tram alive, nor would it have done any good, as the Auxiliaries were powerless (until near the end of the war) to search women. As regards transport, they had only to take it where, when, and how they liked—motors, motor bicycles, lorries, and push-bicycles by the thousand in every part of the country. Think how different the result might have been if the Government had taken up all this transport and reduced the I.R.A. to their flat feet. And, of course, they used the trains freely, and without payment, both to carry arms and men. Young girls, especially if pretty, make far the most dangerous spies in the world; and though they have always been used during a war on a small scale by every country, yet this is probably the first occasion on which a nation has conscripted girls of from twelve to twenty-five years wholesale for this vicious and contaminating work. Even little children were taught the art of eavesdropping, and, of course, if they did not hear every word, readily filled in the blanks from their imagination. Many a man in Ireland during the last two years has lost his life through the medium of a little child. The Markievicz woman ought to appear on the Day of Judgment with the record millstone round her neck. Despatches were carried in dozens of ways—boys on bicycles, men on motor bicycles, who also acted as scouts for ambushes, in the sample cases of bagmen (a common method also at one time of sending arms and ammunition about the country), by the post, and by railway guards—in fact, by every method which came to hand. The I.R.A. obtained much valuable information through opening letters in the post, but their really important and often vital information came to them through a bad leakage in the Castle. Any shortage of recruits was quickly made good by a drastic form of the old pressgang. An unwilling recruit would be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, placed against a wall, and given a minute to decide for King George or the Irish Republic. King George meant a bullet in the brain, probably a dum-dum of the worst description; the Irish Republic meant active service with a flying column at some near future date.