entire Home
Rule Press was a foretaste of the possibilities of the new combinations
with which Labour in Ireland will have to reckon."

As I read all this once again during the height of the rebellion, with
the rattle of the maxims playing upon Boland's mills immediately behind
me, where a couple of hundred of the men he had described were now
fighting Labour's first war under the name of an Irish Republic, at once
the whole aspect of the rebellion changed.

I still wondered, however, why it was that he had left the company of
Wells and Webb and Booth, who were but his English counterparts after
all, and the general policy of Fabianism, when I suddenly discovered the
key not only to the man but to the movement as well, in his definition
of prophecy: "The only true prophets are they who carve out the future
which they announce."

This, then, was the key to it all. Every dreamer should also be a man of
action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I
understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the
"workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which
the prosperous citizens of Dublin--penned up in their houses for the
first time hungry, and for the first time aware of the reality of life's
struggle--could only blindly mass together under the name of "criminal
lunatics," like the anarchists of Sidney Street in London some years
before.

Much less could the pink-faced Derby boys understand--and so I suppose
thought, because the crisis had synchronized with the European war and
was aimed at a state of things tolerated by English rule, it was
therefore only another indication of Ireland's double dose of original
sin, which always drove her to disloyalty to her benefactor.

Dr. O'Dwyer, Bishop of Limerick, one of the ablest as well as the most
independent thinkers in Ireland, has been mentioned as one of the forces
of the rebellion--in fact, he was generally supposed to be one of the
marked men of the Fein programme of suppression, being considered more
dangerous to the realm than Connolly--in a word, he was looked upon as a
red-hot Sinn Feiner. Yet if his famous Lenten pastoral be examined one
will find it merely the broad Christian aspect of the war--nor would the
cynical diplomatist, if we could get him to be candid, say he was far
wrong in his facts.

Thus, for example, speaking of the only possible result of the
prolongation of the war to final victory