“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present position is an evenly matched civil war.” As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded, after perusal, with an endorsement “_Passed by the Censor I. R. A._”; my agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one, however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain neutral. “It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick . . .” “That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted. “You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly. “You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican troops.” “Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs. “Whose king?,” asked Jellaby. The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab before he laid down his arms. “You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully avoiding my uncle’s eye. “The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old enough to remember O’Connell: it always _has_ been somebody else! Will you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his _own_ country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his ‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.” “As your people _do_ say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of course, when you’ve got your republic?” My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this laudable restraint won no favour from the rest. “I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were ordering a well-considered dinner. “Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly from hatred of liberalism.