"If the Home Rule Bill," said _Sinn Fein_, "be signed, but not brought into immediate operation, by the appointment of a Home Rule Executive Government, Ireland is sold and betrayed. Let every Irishman get that into his head and keep it there." "We regard no enemy of England as an enemy of ours.... It was Grattan, the greatest of our constitutional leaders, who declared that if the interests of the Empire clashed with the liberties of Ireland, then he and every Irishman would say 'Live Ireland--perish the Empire.'" _Irish Freedom_ which printed in capitals across its pages mottoes such as "Germany is not Ireland's enemy," "Ireland First, Last and All the Time," said, "If England withdraws her troops utterly from Ireland the Irish Volunteers will take and hold the country, hold it not alone against Germany but against anybody else who attempts to interfere with it. And on no other conditions will the Volunteers consent to move a step.... We are not prepared to buy even freedom--were it offered--at the price of our honour." It declared that "the psychological moment" had arrived for the union of Irishmen, for the attainment of Irish liberty, and proposed for the last time a working arrangement between the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteers to further the real liberties of Ireland. The Labour paper was even more outspoken. It ridiculed the parliamentary leaders for their lack of ability in driving a bargain as compared with the more astute Ulstermen; it ridiculed the advanced Nationalists who still talked nonsense about a junction of the two forces of Volunteers: it declared stoutly, "If England wants an Empire, let her hold the Empire.... Let no Irishman leave his own land.... Keep your guns for your real enemies." While it deplored the success of the recruiting campaign it allowed (with, considering its own strongly expressed views, a commendable toleration) articles to appear from Labour men giving their reasons for supporting the war. But it had no illusions as to what was in store in the end for Irishmen who put its ideas into practice. "For some of us," James Connolly wrote, "the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell, for others more fortunate upon the battlefield of an Ireland in arms for a real republican liberty." But as a last resort even Connolly proposed terms of accommodation: he thought that the Volunteers by the bold policy of refusing to move until their terms were conceded might force the Government to repeal all clauses in the Home Rule Bill denying to Ireland the self-government enjoyed by Canada and Australia. The last number of his paper bore the legend "We serve neither King nor Kaiser." It had been decided by all the political parties that then seemed to count in Ireland that Irishmen must serve, if they served at all, not because they had been given Home Rule but because they had not been given it--because Ireland was still an integral part of the United Kingdom, bound to its