pressures of the moment, Mr. Asquith moved in a wholly different direction.  Redmond’s appeal and advice went totally disregarded.  Yet Redmond knew Ireland as no Englishman could know it; and his hands were clean of guilt for what had happened.  Mr. Asquith by his past inaction, his Tory colleagues by their action before the war, were deeply involved in responsibility.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to find in Mr. Asquith’s conduct any recognition of this cardinal fact.  He judged rebels as if preparations for rebellion had never been palliated or approved.

All that Redmond could achieve was by incessant personal intervention to limit the list of executions, to put some stay on what he called later “the gross and panicky violence” with which measures of suppression were conceived and carried out.  He could not prevent the amazing procedure of sending flying columns throughout the country into places where there had been no hint of disturbance, and making arrests by the hundred without reason given or evidence produced.  In many cases, men who had been thoroughly disgusted by the outbreak found themselves in jail; and disaffection was manufactured hourly.

On May 3rd, when Redmond made his public appeal to Mr. Asquith, it was still not too late to prevent the mischief from spreading.  By general consent, Redmond was right when he said that the rising was thoroughly unpopular in Ireland, and most of all in Dublin.  The troops on whom the insurgents fired were in the first instance Irish troops.  Later in that year I was attached to one of these battalions (the 10th Dublins), and asked them how they did their scouting work during the conflict.  “We needed no scouts,” was the answer; “the old women told us everything.”  The first volley which met a company of this battalion killed an officer; he was so strongly Nationalist in his sympathy as to be almost a Sinn Feiner.  Others had been active leaders in the Howth gun-running.  It was not merely a case of Irishmen firing on their fellow-countrymen:  it was one section of the original Volunteers firing on another.

Yet from the moment when English troops came on the scene, another strain of feeling began to make itself felt.  A lady ordered tea to be made for one of the incoming regiments, halted outside her house on the line of march.  The refreshment was long in coming, and she went down to see why.  She found her cook up in arms:  “Is it me boil the kettle for Englishmen coming in to shoot down Irishmen?” Yet that was still the voice of a minority.  When I came home from France a few weeks later, a shrewd and prosperous Nationalist man of business said to me with fury:  “The fools!  It was the first rebellion that ever had the country against it, and they turned the people round in a week.”