On Friday, November 24th, Mr. Erskine Childers was shot in
the Beggars Bush Barracks. Before his execution he shook hands with the firing squad and bade them "Good-bye." To the military court which tried him he gave a strange rambling account of his life and of how he came to play his part in Ireland. Though he probably deserved his fate, and though probably the Free State Government could not run the risk of pardon- ing him because he was a half-mad Englishman whose services the Sinn Feiners ought never to have accepted, one cannot help feeling the pity which is always awakened by .the tragic vicissitudes of a man of unbalanced mind. The literary man who engages in active politics which he does not really understand, from a heady mixture of foolish ambitions and vague hallucinations, is a piteous spectacle, especially when he is so gallant and ingenious as Childers was before he drank the sinister potion of the Irish conspirators. With all his faults and follies and crimes—he used and sanc- tioned murder—he was a brave man and died with a gallantry worthy of a wholesomer cause.
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