It was put upon record later by a member of the committee that in the task of arming the Volunteers the new members gave little effective assistance, and that when arms were obtained they tried to have them taken from the men who had paid for them and handed over _gratis_ to the Hibernians of the North to use (without, it is true, a supply of ammunition) to overawe the aggression of the Ulster Volunteers. But the members of the original committee procured arms upon their own responsibility. In July they succeeded in imitating the exploit of the Ulstermen at Larne. They ran a cargo of rifles into Howth and another was landed at Kilcool. But the forces of the Crown, absent at Larne and inactive in Ulster ever since, displayed their unsuccessful vigour at Howth. The Volunteers were intercepted on the way back, but after a scuffle succeeded in getting away with their guns. The soldiers on the return journey fired upon a provoking but unarmed crowd in the streets of Dublin. The country had barely time to appreciate the contrast between Larne and Howth, when the sound of the German guns in Belgium broke upon its ears. SINN FEIN, 1914-1916. John Mitchel had prophesied that "in the event of a European war a strong national party could grasp the occasion" in Ireland, and Mitchel held too high a place in the estimation of Irish Nationalists for his words to have been forgotten or ignored. When Saurin (who, though an Orangeman and a Tory and, after the Union, one of the law officers of the Crown in Ireland, opposed the policy of Castlereagh) uttered his famous dictum on the validity of the Act of Union, he provided Irish Nationalism with one of its most authoritative maxims: "You may make the Union binding as a law, but you cannot make it obligatory in conscience: it will be obeyed as long as England is strong, but resistance to it will be in the abstract a duty and the exhibition of that resistance will be a mere question of prudence." Irish Separatists did not always find it prudent to speak with the precision of the future Attorney-General: but the principle which he laid down was always understood to be one of which they acknowledged the validity. It had been repeated in language less classical, but equally emphatic, by Parnell and Mr. Redmond; but the occasion to put into practice the prudence of which Saurin spoke had either never come or never been seized. But that it would come some day and in an unquestionable shape was a maxim of the Separatists. The increasing signs of antagonism between England and Germany had not since the beginning of the century escaped watchful eyes in Ireland. In the year 1900 _The United Irishman_ in discussing German diplomacy had referred to the alliance between Irish and Germans in the United States which (it added) "is such a welcome feature of contemporary politics." When, two years before the war, Mr. Churchill had referred in guarded language to the necessity to England of