All this, of course, goes to disprove that the Bishop of Limerick was a Sinn Feiner, but it also goes to prove that one cannot shake the foundations of international relations without stirring internal conditions to their very depths.
The clergy, however, were upon the whole, as they always are, with the Government, as was instanced in a hundred different cases during the rebellion.
Two of the leaders were typical of the old Fenians of darker days. One was Thomas Clarke, who earned his living by running a newsagent's and tobacconist's shop, but who was also engaged a lot in writing for many of the minor newspapers which were responsible for much of the propaganda which prepared the way for the rising.
The other—better known especially in the days of the South African War, when he was, like Colonel Lynch, one of the Nationalist heroes—was "Major" John McBride, who had actually raised an Irish Brigade to fight for the Boers against the British, and who must consequently have felt a very kindred spirit in Sir Roger Casement, who was merely repeating his tactics.
It shows how much Irish politics have progressed, however, that while all Nationalist Ireland is now watching the trial for high treason of Sir Roger Casement with indifference, the Nationalists of those days nominated McBride as Parliamentary candidate for South Mayo when a vacancy occurred by the resignation of Mr. Davitt.
He was at the time of the rising engaged as an official of the Dublin Corporation, and had been married to—and divorced from—Miss Maud Gonne, a patriot of much the same type as the Countess Markievicz.
It was he who had conducted the fight at Jacobs's factory.
McBride was really the one link between the two wars—the Anglo-Boer and the Anglo-German War, to use a Sinn Fein phrase—and if his later attitude was now impracticable, it was certainly logical and consistent with itself.
The main difference, however, was in the circumstances, and these he, like many others, refused to admit had changed.
Thus ten years before he had gone to Paris as one of the delegates from the Irish Transvaal Committee to ex-President Kruger, who told him that "he would never forget how the Irish Brigade stood by the men of the Transvaal in their hour of need."