It is difficult to conceive a course of action more nicely calculated to demonstrate on a large scale the principal theses which Sinn Fein had been preaching for years. The demonstration was carried into every household in Ireland in a form in which it could no longer be ignored. Conscription had not been a palatable measure in England, and it had not been put into force until the English people had agreed with practical unanimity that they must submit to it: but the choice had been their own and no Government would have ventured even to propose it until the English people had made up their minds beforehand to accept it when it should be proposed. In Australia it had been discussed and rejected; and no one either in England or anywhere else had questioned the right of the people of Australia to decline to conscribe themselves, though the interests of Australia were as vitally involved in the issue of the war as the interests of England. Ireland, on the other hand, while it was opposed to Conscription, had no choice offered to it in the matter. It was decided upon by a Cabinet of which no Irishman was a member and it was to be enforced in spite not merely of the protests of Ireland but of the grave warnings of a large number of Englishmen. To the argument that Ireland, being an integral part of the United Kingdom, must submit to the legislation of Parliament whether it liked it or no, it was pointed out that this argument had not been enforced against Ulster four years before; that when Conscription had first been enforced in England it had been admitted by Parliament that Ireland was a special case; that to assert that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom was to beg the very question in dispute, since the national claim of Ireland had always been a claim for independence. Again, if the Home Rule Act was relied upon (as the Premier relied upon it) to prove that Ireland had accepted the authority of Parliament in Imperial matters and acknowledged its supreme jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to war and peace, it was pointed out that the Government which now invoked it had persistently refused to put it into operation. Yet the Premier, who, more than any other single man, had shown himself hostile in deed, while friendly in word, to Irish claims, himself admitted that Irishmen serving in the army in the then condition of Irish affairs would be fighting abroad to enforce a principle denied in the government of their own country. The conclusion which Sinn Fein drew was that the English Government was prepared in defiance of public feeling, justice and constitutional practice to enforce Conscription upon Ireland by naked force: that it had no intention of granting Ireland any form of self-government, and that it was the duty of Irishmen to organize "an effective and protracted resistance." But, though prepared to resist, it continued to argue. It pointed out that the Irish