Pamphlet. St. Vincent de Paul Society.]

[Footnote 9: "How Local Milk Depots in Ireland Are Worked." Dollard.
Dublin. 1915. P. 3-15.]

[Footnote 10: "Second Annual Report of the Woman's National Health
Association." Waller and Company. Dublin. 1909. P. 143.]

[Footnote 11: "Supplement Fifty-fourth Report Inspectors of Lunacy." Alex
Thorn. Dublin. 1906. P. VII.]

[Footnote 12: Ibid. P. XXVII.]

[Footnote 13: "Sixty-second Annual Report of the Registrar General for
Scotland, 1916." His Majesty's Stationery Office. Edinburgh. 1918. P.
LXVII.]

[Footnote 14: "Marriages, Births, and Deaths in Ireland, 1917." P. XII.]

[Footnote 15: "Supplement Fifty-fourth Report Inspectors of Lunacy." P.
XXXII.]

[Footnote 16: "The Woman's National Health Association and Infant Welfare."
The Child. June, 1911. P. 10.]

[Footnote 17: Figures supplied by H.C. Ferguson, Superintendent of Charity
Organization Society, Belfast, 1919.]

[Footnote 18: "Irish Education Act, 1892." (55 & 56 Vict.) Chap. 42. P. 1.]

[Footnote 19: Ibid. P. 1.]

[Footnote 20: Ibid. P. 4.]

[Footnote 21: Ibid. P. 3.]

[Footnote 22: Ibid. P. 8 et al.]

[Footnote 23. "Vice-regal Committee of Enquiry into Primary Education,
Ireland, 1918." His Majesty's Stationery Office. Dublin. 1919. P. 22.]

[Footnote 24: Ibid. P. 22.]

[Footnote 25: Ibid. Martin Reservation. P. 27-30.]

[Footnote 26: Ibid. P. 8.]

[Footnote 27: Ibid. P. 39.]

II

SINN FEIN AND REVOLUTION

WILL SOCIAL CONDITION LEAD TO IMMEDIATE REVOLUTION?

"Eamonn De Valera, the President of the Irish Republic, who has been in hiding since his escape from Lincoln jail, will be welcomed back to Dublin by a public reception. Tomorrow evening at seven o'clock he will be met at the Mount street bridge by Lawrence O'Neill, Lord Mayor of Dublin…."

The news note was in the morning papers. In small type it was hidden on the back pages—the Irish papers have a curious habit of six-pointing articles in which the people are vitally interested and putting three-column heads on such stuff as: "Do Dublin Girls Rouge?" That day the concern of the people was unquestionably not rouge but republics. For the question that sibilated in Grafton street cafes and at the tram change at Nelson pillar was: "Will Dublin Castle permit?"

Orders and gun enforcement. The empire did not deviate from the usual program of empires—action without discussion. In the crises that are always occurring between organized revolt and the empire, there is never any consideration of the physical agony that goads the people to revolt. There wasn't now. By early afternoon, the answer, on great, black-lettered posters, was swabbed to the sides of buildings all over town:

"DE VALERA RECEPTION FORBIDDEN!"

That was the headline, and after instructions warning the people not to take part in the ceremony, the government order ended:

"GOD SAVE THE KING!"

How would the revolutionaries reply? Rumors ran riot. The Sinn Fein volunteers would pit themselves against His Majesty's troops. The streets would be red again. The belief that the meeting would be held in spite of the proclamation was supported by a statement on green-lettered posters that appeared later next the British dictum:

"LORD MAYOR REQUESTS GOOD ORDER AT RECEPTION!"

This plea was followed by a paragraph asking that the people attending the reception would not allow themselves to be provoked into disorder by the British military. Then there was the concluding exclamation:

"GOD SAVE IRELAND!"

On my way to the Sinn Fein headquarters in Harcourt street, I passed the Mansion House of the Lord Mayor and found two long-coated Dublin Military Police stripping the new wet poster from the yellow walls. When I arrived at Number 6, Harcourt street, I saw black-clad Mrs. Sheehy-Sheffington, in somewhat agitated absorption of thought, coming down the worn steps of the old Georgian house. In the upper back room, earnest young secretaries worked in swift silence. One of them, a curly-haired girl with her mouth o-ed about a cigarette, puffed unceasingly. At last Harry Boland, secretary of Sinn Fein, entered.

"The council decides tonight," he admitted. His eyes were bright and faraway like one whose mind is on a coming crisis. When I told him I would drop in again to hear the decision, he protested that they would be at it till late. On my counter protest that time made no difference to me, he promised that if I would not come he would send me word at eleven that night. "But I think," he added, "we won't know till morning."

At ten that night, Boots knocked at my door. I concluded that there had been a stampeded decision. But on going out I discovered the Associated Press correspondent there. He told me that he heard that I was to receive the news and that he did not believe that there was any necessity of bothering the Sinn Feiners twice for the same decision.

"I think the reception is quite likely," he volunteered. "This afternoon a good many of the Sinn Fein army were at University chapel at confession. At the girls' hostels of National University—which is regarded as a sort of adolescent Sinn Fein headquarters—there have been strict orders that the girls are to remain indoors tomorrow night."

When the messenger arrived at eleven to say that no decision had been reached, I made an appointment for an interview on the following day with DeValera.

Electricity was in the air by morning. There were all sorts of sparks. Young men in civilian clothes ran for trams with their hands over their hip pockets. A delightful girl whom I had met, boarded my car with a heavy parcel in her hands. As the British officer next me rose to give her his seat, her cheeks became very pink. Sometime later she told me that, like the rest of the Sinn Fein volunteers, she had received her mobilization orders, and that the parcel the officer had relented for was—her rifle.

At that time, her division of the woman's section of the Sinn Fein volunteers was pressing a plan for the holding of the reception. In order, however, that no needed fighters would be killed, the girls had asked that they should be first to meet the president. Then, when the machine guns commenced, "only girls" would fall.

Into College Green a brute of a tank had cruised. The man in charge was inviting people to have a look. Inside there were red-lipped munition boxes, provender cases, and through the skewer-sized sight-holes next the jutting guns, there were glimpses of shoppers emerging from Grafton street into the Green. Over the city, against the silver-rimmed, Irish gray clouds, aeroplanes—there were sixteen in one formation—buzzed insistently. Between the little stone columns of the roof railing of Trinity College, machine guns poked out their cold snouts.

"Smoke bombs were dropped over Mount street bridge today," said Harry Boland with a shrug of his shoulders when I arrived at Sinn Fein headquarters to ask if the reception would still be held. "What can we do against a force like theirs?"

But there was a strained feeling at headquarters as if the decision had been made after a hard fight. Alderman Thomas Kelly,