Well assured are we that you, Mr. President, whose exhortations have inspired the Small Nations of the world with fortitude to defend to the last their liberties against oppressors, will not be found among those who would condemn Ireland for a determination which is irrevocable to continue steadfastly in the course mapped out for her, no matter what the odds, by an unexampled unity of National judgment and National right. Given at the Mansion House, Dublin, this 11th day of June, 1918. LAURENCE O'NEILL, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Chairman of a Conference of representative Irishmen whose names stand hereunder. JOSEPH DEVLIN, JOHN DILLON, MICHAEL JOHNSON, WILLIAM O'BRIEN (Lab.), T.M. HEALY, WILLIAM O'BRIEN, THOMAS KELLY, and JOHN MACNEILL: {Acting in the place E. DE VALERA and A. GRIFFITH, deported 18th of May, 1918, to separate prisons in England, without trial or accusation--communication with whom has been cut off.} APPENDIX B UNIONIST LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON CITY HALL, BELFAST, _August 1st_, 1918. To THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SIR, A manifesto signed by the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party and certain other Irish gentlemen has been widely circulated in the United Kingdom, in the form of a letter purporting to have been addressed to your Excellency.[110] Its purpose appears to be to offer an explanation of, and an excuse for, the conduct of the Nationalist Party in obstructing the extension to Ireland of compulsory military service, which the rest of the United Kingdom has felt compelled to adopt as the necessary means of defeating the German design to dominate the world. At a time when all the free democracies of the world have, with whatever reluctance, accepted the burden of conscription as the only alternative to the destruction of free institutions and of international justice, it is easily intelligible that those who maintain Ireland's right to solitary and privileged exemption from the same obligation should betray their consciousness that an apologia is required to enable them to escape condemnation at the bar of civilised, and especially of American, opinion. But, inasmuch as the document referred to would give to anyone not intimately familiar with British domestic affairs the impression that it represents the unanimous opinion of Irishmen, it is important that your Excellency and the American people should be assured that this is very far from being the case.