THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916.*

Mn. J. F. BOYLE has produced a useful record in piecing together all the important published facts about the Irish revolt. Ho begins by tracing the rise of the Sinn Fein movement, and shows how at first, with its not very appealing programme, it had but a small following. Neither the ,proposal _that the Irish•Nationalist Members should withdr4 from

Westminster, nor the proposal that Irish Consuls should be appointed all over the -world; was a satisfactory basis for a going political concern. Depend on yourselves " is an attractive motto in itself, but the majority of Irishmen before the Great War broke out preferred to depend upon the British Treasury for money and on their own mental efforts only for grievances. One of the inspirers of the Sinn Fein movement, who was also virtually its founder, was Mr. Arthur Griffith, a journalist of Welsh extraction, whose name became of less account in the later phases. Mr. Boyle, by the way, spells his name both " Griffith " and " Griffiths." Sims Fein had a discipleship of feverish intellcteuals from the beginning, and almost any farmer in Ireland would have told you that the organization was composed of cranks.

Indeed, the aloofness of the farmers was the weakness of Sinn Fein, even when it seized the opportunity of the war to plot open and violent sedition. Not that the farmers are by any means friendly as a whole to-Great Britain, but they know where their interests lie. They dislike Great Britain and the distraction of rebellion about equally. Their real love is their land—which Great Britain •secured to them on very easy terms. If the rebellion had spread and had had a great success, there is no knowing what line the farmers would have taken ; but, as it was, they were never seriously put to the test. A curious fact is that Sinn Fein was aided indirectly, before it became openly seditious, not only by the O'Brienites but even by some Unionists, both of whom found in it a- useful weapon against Mr. Redmond's Parliamentary Nationalism.

There is nothing in history, we believe, to match the publicity with which the Sinn Feiners made their preparations for revolt. There was none of the secret oath-taking associated with rebellion. It was as though they played on the likelihood that the Government would not fear a danger so preposterously obvious. As every one knows, sham attacks were conducted against some of the places in Dublin afterwards to be attacked in earnest. Apart from the aloofness of the farmers, to which we have already referred, there were military weaknesses in the rebellion. The chicf'weakness, and it would have been fatal even if the numbers of the rebels had been vastly greater than they were, was that there was no artillery. We wonder whether, if Sinn Fein artillery had habitually clattered through the Dublin streets in the days before the revolt, Mr. Birrcll would even then have objected. One almost fancies that he would not—that he would have objected to nothing.

Another weakness which affected the numbers of the rebels was the cancellation by Professor John MacNeill of the " manoeuvres" of the Irish (or Sinn Fein) Volunteers on the eve of the rising. Professor MacNeill's reason is not stated, but apparently some of the leaders of the rebels thought that the time was not ripe for manoeuvres to become open hostilities, or they shrank from the reality at the last moment when they saw what was intended. Whatever the explanation,

• The Irish Rebellion of 1916: a Brief History of the Revolt anti its Suppression. By John F. Boyle. Loudon : Constable and Co. 14s. 01. net.1

there was the weakness of divided counsels. A good move from the rebel's point of view was the seizure of Jacob's biscuit factory, which immediately placed in their hands a largo supply of provisions. In the case of all the large public buildings which they occupied—such, for instance, as the imposing Four Courts, which commands the quays— they seem to have assumed that the troops would not use artillery against these valuable places. But they were wrong. If Sir John Maxwell had been content to rely upon sniping, the revolt might have gone on for many weeks. The stake at issue was far too great ; there was a danger of the rapid spread of the rising if the rebels were en- couraged by partial successes while the whole attention of Great Britain was required to fight the Germans. Public buildings were never dis- figured or shattered by shell-fire with greater justification than last Easter at Dublin.

Other failures of the rebels cannot be described, in the same sense as those above, as military weaknesses, because they were not such as might certainly have been provided against by foresight. The rebels failed, for example, to capture great railway stations. Kingsbridge Station is the station at which the Curragh troops arrived, and it would have been a tremendous advantage to the rebels if they had been able to take and hold it. Another station which was vainly included in their scheme for seizure was the Amiens Street Station. Still more disastrous for the rebels was their failure to rush the Telephone Exchange. The seizure of the Post Office was undoubtedly a coup, but as the telephones were still at the disposal of the loyalists, the plan for isolating Dublin broke down hopelessly. The rebels' intention was to hold an outer and an inner ring of defences, but their numbers were not nearly enough for the outer ring. The plan, however, manifested a skilful use of urban geography, and it was in this respect that the rebels nearly always fought at an advantage. Every sniper' a nook was carefully chosen with a view to its field of fire and its line of escape. The troops, who knew little or nothing of the geography of Dublin, were taken by surprise again and again. Here is an illustration of the rebels' cunning. They attached great importance (for food supply) to a bakery which they seized. They also seized a distillery which stood next to it : " They ran up a green flag on the top of the distillery, started signalling seawards, and posted half a dozen men with rifles at different points of the building. The result was that the distillery was razed to the ground. Some shells were fired in the direction of the bakery, but it was not destrelyed." Some parts of Dublin are an ideal ground for snipers. Mr. Boyle says:— "Cleverly posted snipers developed a positive art for concealment, and the troops were fired at from the most unexpected angles. Artillery was of little avail in such circumstances. By the time even a small gun could be trained on a building from which shots had been fired, the snipers had evacuated it and taken up a new position in another building. The narrow lanes and alleys, the tumble-down houses, the opportunities for those who knew the locality of utilizing back-ways, and even of getting from house to house by means of the roofs—all these circum- stances made the neighbourhood a truly ideal one for the adventurous and enterprising sniper."

As for the treatment of the residents in private houses, who suddenly found themselves the unwiling hosts of rebels in arms, Mr. Boyle says:— " The mode of procedure adopted by the insurgents, when they took possession of private houses, was simple. The women and children were, in many cases, allowed to leave, and so also were the men, but they were cautioned not to give information to the military authorities. In some instances the families remained in the basements whilst firing took place continuously from the upper windows. Unable to leave their houses, forced to live on such small rations as remained in their larders, the plight of the unfortunate inhabitants of these residences can well be imagined. Several of them who ventured into their gardens, or out on the streets, were shot either by stray bullets or because they were mistaken by snipers as possible enemies. Driven to desperation in some eases by the persistent firing and the constant danger night and day, it was not unusual to see families consisting of the husband, the wife and the children, place their money and jewellery in aperambulator, and, under oover of a white flag, rush fram their houses to friends in some other and safer portion of the city."

As regards the munitions of the rebels, Mr. Boyle says that they included melinite bombs, Manses and Holton rifles, Army rifles, automatic rifles and pistols, sporting guns, revolvers, and stores of gelignite, cordite, gun-cotton, and dynamite. Some of the dynamite had been imported in boxes labelled " Margarine."

The biographical notes on some of the rebel leaders are interesting. The careers of the fantastic Countess Markievicz, of Pearse, the school- master, and of MacDonagh, the minor poet, are described, but Mr. Boyle thinks that Connolly was by far the most able leader and organizer. A self-educated man from the North of Ireland, Connolly was a deter- - mined and aggressive Socialist. His hatred was not for Great Britain, but for capitalists. He had a profound dislike for mere oratory, and was direct and curt in all his speech. He was in command at the Post Office. Mr. Boyle gives us the poem which Pearse wrote on the eve of his execution :—

" THE WAYFARER.

The beauty of this world has made me sad ; This beauty that will pass; Sometimes my heart had shaken with great joy, To see a leapmg squirrel in a tree, Or little rabbits in a field at evening,

Lit by a staring sun ;

On some green hill, where shadows drifting by ; Some quietude where mountainy men had sown And some would reap, near to the gate of heaven, - Or children with bare feet upon the sands of some ebbed sea, Or playing in the streets of little towns in Connacht,

Things young and happy—

And then my heart had told me, These will pass

Will pass and, change, will die, and be no more,

Things bright and green, things young and happy, And I have gone upon my way—sorrowfuL"

It is evident that a large number of malcontents in Ireland are mal- contents only because they are intimidated into popular movements. There seems to be a great opportunity for enlightenment. Those who are half inclined already to regard rebellion as an expensive nuisance might be set wholly against quarrelling with Great Britain if only they understood the measure of their debt. If Home Rule is established under the Amended Act, there will have to be a very large payment from the British Treasury, since the principal revenue-paying part of Ireland will be separated from the Dublin Parliament But as it is, the debt of Ireland to Great Britain is very large. We wish that every one in Ireland could read a letter which Mr. T. W. Rollestoii sent lately to the Westminster Gazette. Casement at his trial, in describing the situation in Ireland, used these words : " When all your rights become only an accumulated wrong ; when men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land; to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruit of their own labours—and even while they beg, to see those things inexorably withdrawn from them." But, as Mr. Rolleston, himself a Home Ruler, says, some Irish classes are better pro. tested than any of the corresponding classes in Great Britain. As for " thinking their own thoughts and singing their own songs," the Government have never done anything whatever to impede this practice. On the contrary, they have encouraged it. They have liberally endowed a National University, which has perfect freedom of internal control and has made the Irish language an obligatory subject. Four Professors (one of them was President of the Sinn Fein Volunteers) are paid hand- some salaries to promote the very studies which Casement said aro banned. More than that, for many years there has been an Imperial grant of from £15,000 to £20,000 a year for the teaching of Gaelic in schools. A few days before the Sinn Fein revolt an Irish athletic organization was exempted from taxation because it calls its games " Gaelic," though they differ in no material respect from the gamei in order to organize which English clubs pay heavy taxes -without a murmur No ; as Mr. Rolleston acutely says, what the Sinn Fein revolt has accomplished is to encourage bureaucracies all over the world to conclude that the grant of personal and spiritual freedom does not pay, and that therefore rigour probably will