rganized popular movement, such as a
revolution, the most important things to examine are the minds and the
men that directed it, for it is only by means of these forces that
simmering discontents take definite shape and concrete determination.

But it often happens that the characters of the leaders themselves and
even the objective remedies they propose are quite out of keeping with
the solution of the real grievances they complain of.

Once given leadership, and confidence, fidelity, and sincerity follow
among the rank and file as naturally as water flows from a spring--being
the common factor of humanity--and this seems to have been the case in
the Sinn Fein rebellion of 1916.

On the whole they had no reason to be ashamed of their leaders, though
they might have questioned their wisdom. Now, wickedness in the
political sense connotes the revolt against the organized authority of
the State--political foolishness, the utter impossibility of realizing a
practical aim. Naturally, therefore, the law was officially bound to
look upon them as a species of criminal lunatics. Public men, moreover,
were forced by the very theory of government to denounce them, in
consequence, as enemies, and call for the sternest penalties of
retribution known to the Constitution, in order that the individual's
fate might become an object-lesson to the mass.

Once having granted this, however, the civilian mind is free to make the
inquiry--whether from morbid, scientific, dramatic, or emotional reasons
matters little--as to what manner of men these leaders were, and what
manner of minds gave the revolt its psychological aspect: but in that
inquiry no criterion of loyalty except that of fidelity to their own
personal convictions must be allowed to enter. Probably the most serious
mistake usually made by Irish politicians is that of classing successive
rebellions as the acts of traitors or martyrs, according to their
respective points of view, and certainly statesmen and thinkers could
make no greater error in diagnosing the present one.

Rebellions are not the outcome of innate perversity of race, but purely
scientific phenomena with objective causes. First, then, let us examine
the men themselves who led the revolt, before we pass on to the
literature that informed and inspired it.

Sir Roger Casement was not the founder of "Sinn Fein," nor was he the
originator of the Labour Movement in Ireland: he found both ready-made
and used them