The resentment at the execution of the leaders of the Rising had not confined itself to the indulgence of feelings of rage and sorrow. It had led to an eager inquiry into what it was that had caused these men to do what they did. People who had hardly heard of Sinn Fein before wanted to know precisely what it was and what it taught: people who had not known Pearse and Connolly when they were alive were full of curiosity about them, their principles and their writings. Much of this curiosity was morbid and led nowhere: but a great deal of it led large numbers of people very far indeed. Sinn Fein pamphlets began to be in demand: a month after the Rising it was hardly possible to procure a single one of them. But if they could not be bought, thumbed and tattered copies were passed from hand to hand: their teachings and the doctrines of Sinn Fein were discussed all over Ireland. The (to many) surprising fact became known that the Rising was not an attempt to help Germany or to put Ireland into German possession, but to free Ireland from all foreign influence: that the leaders proclaimed themselves followers of Tone and Mitchel and Davis and Parnell, that they claimed that Irish Nationalism meant according to these exponents (and no man in Ireland ventured to question their authority) Irish independence, nothing less and nothing more. The instinct for freedom, the feeling that the existing Government of Ireland had not for a hundred years fulfilled the primary functions of government, became a reasoned and rooted conviction that something more was needed to mend it than mere Home Rule. The price that Ireland had been asked to pay for Home Rule, that it was still pertinaciously pressed to agree to, the partition of Ireland, seemed an unforgivable treachery beside the fair prospect of an Ireland one and indivisible, in which Orange and Green, Protestant and Catholic were united in the love and service of a common country. The policies of the past, barren as they now seemed of content and substance, were abandoned for the new promise of a commonwealth in which all Irishmen should be equal, in which the worker saw a prospect of a better and a fuller life than without it he could hope to have. This had been the ideal of the Rising; but it was the bitter truth that the Rising had not brought it any nearer, and that no Rising seemed likely to be any more successful. Sinn Fein with its policy of self-reliance, of refusing to recognize what it hoped by so doing to bring to nothing, of distrust of all policies of reaching freedom by an acknowledgment of subjection offered the means of realizing what the Rising had failed to bring nearer. But Sinn Fein could not be accepted as it stood: offering the Constitution of 1782 it had failed to carry with it more than a few doctrinaire enthusiasts: agreeing to the constitution which the leaders of the Rising died for it might (and did) carry the country with it.