ed for an official inquiry into the
alleged "reprisals" and particularly instanced the attacks upon the
creameries. Rather than that Ireland should be "pacified" by such
methods as these he would see her engaged in civil war, "fairly
conducted on both sides." From these words it may be gathered that his
lordship's knowledge of civil war is happily not extensive.

Furnished with a voluminous brief from the Irish Office, Lord CURZON
made a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals
were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest
were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been
brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had
instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the
offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public
inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would only substitute "a
competition in perjury" for the present "competition in murder"--a
somewhat infelicitous phrase by which, as he subsequently explained, he
did not mean to imply, as Lord PARMOOR suggested, that police and rebels
were engaged in a murderous rivalry.

Simultaneously the House of Commons was engaged upon an identically
similar debate. Mr. ARTHUR HENDERSON was as lugubrious as Lord CREWE in
presenting the indictment and distinctly less adroit in selecting his
facts. His theory was that the Government had provoked the Sinn Fein
outrages by its treatment of the people. Why, women had been prevented
from taking their eggs to market!

Sir HAMAR GREENWOOD spoke from the same brief as Lord CURZON, but threw
far more passion and vigour into its recital. There had been some
reprisals, he admitted, but they were as nothing compared to the horrors
that had provoked them; and he protested against the notion that "the
heroes of yesterday"--the R.I.C. is mainly recruited from ex-service
men--had turned into murderers. As for the creameries, he had never seen
a tittle of evidence that they had been destroyed by servants of the
Crown, and he warned the House not to believe the stories put out by the
propaganda bureau of the Irish Republican Army. He was still a convinced
Home Ruler--an Ulster hot-gospeller had accused him of being a Sinn
Feiner with a Papist wife!--but the first thing to do was to break the
reign of terror and end the rule of the assassin. That they were doing,
and there was no case for Mr. HENDERSON'S "insulting reso