When the formidable nature of the task they had undertaken dawned upon the Lord Lieutenant and his Chief Secretary, it was decided by the Irish Government to cut the sinews of the opposition by the arrest of those who were chiefly responsible for fomenting it. But it was clearly impossible to clap the Catholic Bishops and the Mansion House Conference into gaol in a body. It was plain that Sinn Fein was the chief centre of the trouble, being the only political party whose principles furnished a logical ground for opposition to the conscription of Ireland by Act of Parliament. The two Sinn Fein members of the Mansion House Conference, Messrs. de Valera and Griffith, with a number of less prominent Sinn Feiners, were deported and imprisoned. But this was a course which required some explanation. They were not the only people prominent in the Anti-Conscription campaign; and in any case English public opinion while, on the whole, indignant with the attitude of Ireland towards compulsory service, was becoming somewhat uneasy as to happenings in Ireland and inclined to question the entire wisdom of the Irish Executive. Accordingly, it was asserted that the arrested Sinn Feiners had been guilty of complicity in a German plot. The ex-Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, during whose tenure of office the discovery of the plot (it was said) began to be made, publicly and flatly denied all knowledge of it, and expressed disbelief in its existence. The Premier announced that he had seen the evidence (which nothing, however, would induce him to divulge) and that it was even as the Irish Government had said. Public opinion however was still unsatisfied, and the Irish office issued a statement on the subject in which the Chief Secretary argued ("for even though vanquished he could argue still") from the history of Sinn Fein for the previous three or four years, and from certain financial transactions between Count Bernstorff and some Irish-Americans before America entered the war, that some person or persons in Ireland had been in communication with Germany for a treasonable purpose. However that may have been, there was no direct evidence connecting any of the prisoners with any of these transactions, and in fact nearly all of them had been in gaol in England at the time when the transactions took place. The official statement was pitilessly analysed in a pamphlet published by _New Ireland_ entitled "The Plot: German or English?" the only result of the whole affair being that official credit in Ireland received its last shock. No further attempts were made to provide non-political reasons for political arrests: it was judged better that the Executive should rely upon the extraordinary powers conferred upon it by the Defence of the Realm Act (though the machinery provided by what was known as "the ordinary law" in Ireland seemed sufficiently complete without it) to arrest, without the necessity of charge or trial, any persons who made themselves prominent for the