"When England declared," wrote _Nationality_, "that she entered this war with the object of asserting the freedom of Small Nations the Lord delivered her into our hands." There were not wanting signs that the Sinn Fein policy was rapidly becoming the policy of a Nationalist Ireland. By the summer of 1917 at least a dozen Irish newspapers were declared exponents of the Sinn Fein policy. An election for North Roscommon in February had resulted in the return of the Sinn Fein candidate by an overwhelming majority. The next contested election was in May and was by common consent regarded as a test election. It was a straight fight between the Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein. Each party put its full strength into the contest and Sinn Fein won; the majority, it is true, was a small one but it was more useful than a large one, for it was both an endorsement and an incentive. The _Manchester Guardian_ frankly declared that the Sinn Fein victory under the circumstances was equivalent to a serious defeat of the British Army in the field. The reply of the Government to the result of the North Roscommon election had been the re-arrest and deportation of some of the released prisoners, to whom a number of others, some of them prominent Gaelic Leaguers, were added; the Chief Secretary defended this action by saying that he had decided "although there can be no charge and although there can be no trial" that it was better for these men to be out of Ireland than to be in it. The Parliamentary Party, opposed upon principle to Sinn Fein, saw that measures such as these meant its ultimate and complete triumph, but no arguments could move the determination of the Government to rely upon force. They seemed to feel that force was the only weapon that was left them and that they might as well use it at once; while Sinn Fein could point to the employment of it as evidence of its own reiterated but constantly challenged contention as to the real attitude of all English Governments towards Ireland. And had the Prime Minister and his advisers, whoever they may have been, deliberately set themselves to prove to Ireland that they were not the wise representatives of an enlightened and friendly democracy (which the Parliamentary Party had up to this represented them to be) but the jealous and implacable guardians of a subject and hated race (which Sinn Fein had always asserted that they were) it is very doubtful whether they could have bettered their record in a single detail. The Parliamentary Party, fighting for its life, with the ground in Ireland slipping from under its feet, appealed pathetically to its old services and old friendship, to the memory of the Irishmen who had fallen in the war, to the opinion of moderate men, to prudence and justice; it could not deflect by one hair's breadth the course chosen by the Cabinet. The fact seems to be that the Tory members who had always hated the Parliamentary Party saw the chance of paying back old scores and