“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.” “If you’re going to hang for treason, you must hang for constructive treason, for constructive mutiny and for acquiescence in constructive treason and mutiny,” I pointed out: “that brings in the covenanters, the Curragh people and the Asquith cabinet.” Dainton, I knew, was a covenanter; and I wanted him to see the implication of his wholesale executions. “Personally, I don’t think hanging or shooting ever does much good . . .” “It would have been a good thing,” Bertrand interrupted, “if you’d shot the entire 1914 House of Commons.” “But as a policy for the government in 1920?,” I asked. I have thought over this dinner a dozen times since; and, when ministers were attacked for permitting the slaughter and reprisals that followed, I would sometimes ask their critics if they could do better than the reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-informed and reasonably sane men who shewed themselves so crass, ignorant and mad at this meeting. “For all the good we’ve done,” I told Bertrand, as we walked home, “I might as well have been in the country.” “Don’t leave me yet,” he begged. And throughout the late summer and early autumn I was torn between Barbara’s entreaties that I should come back to Crawleigh and Bertrand’s reproach that I was deserting him when he most needed me. As a study in “that which remained” I suppose these barren passions claim their place: in our politics, as in our work and play, our gettings and spendings, our crimes and insanities, we lived more rapidly, more violently. The growing disorders of Ireland were ascribed to a “murder-gang”; in the spirit of the age, they were met by irregular troops, with general instructions to give at least as good as they received. Under the reign of reprisals, there was inaugurated an organized terror for which there had been no parallel since the first French revolution. Burning, looting, killing and torturing were paid back, with interest, in the same currency. Mysterious and fatal lists of names were passed up and down the country; the mails were now intercepted at will; and, when far-scattered, unsuspecting men and women were done to death by simultaneous blows, a whisper of “spy” and “counter-spy”—words that had lost their meaning—explained this opposing secret carnage which no man had power to stop. Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor who had broken faith with the South.