In other words, as long as the suppression has only been a military suppression it has been no suppression at all; any more than a delirious patient who is drugged or held down by force by a couple of hospital porters is cured by that expedient.
Moreover, all such expedients are necessarily merely temporary, and what we want to get at are the root causes of the complaint.
We must therefore fully diagnose those grievances of which the rebellion was only the outward symptom, and against which the Republic was more, after all, a symbolic protest than anything else; it was no more really intended to establish a Celtic Commonwealth than Sir Edward Carson's army was to change a Province into a Kingdom. Both were façons de parler, and the word "provisional" saved them from ridicule they would otherwise have deserved.
I remember speaking to a prominent Sinn Feiner only a couple of days before the revolt with a view to writing an article on the Volunteers, and this is what he said:—
"It would be very difficult for anyone to write anything just at present, for things are trembling in the balance. There is a most tremendous battle going on at the present moment at the Castle, we understand, between General Friend and Augustine Birrell—in other words, between the military and the civil authorities—and everything depends upon that issue.
"They want to take away our arms, for example, and not those of Redmond or Carson, and the latter will stand by and see it done without a word; but we know that's only the thin end of the wedge of the complete subjugation of Ireland to the soldier, as in the days of Cromwell, and even if we stand alone we will stop that.
"They don't half of them know a tenth of our power; even people in Ireland don't realize it. We are completely organized and perfectly equipped, far better even than the Ulster Volunteers are, and they will find out their mistake when they try.
"They've made two attempts already, in a hole-and-corner sort of way, at the Gaelic Press and at Liberty Hall, and the police found themselves looking into the barrels of revolvers each time. Well, all I can say is, when the day comes and they determine to strike—and we'll get wind of it—you may depend upon it the whole world will get a surprise; it will be like nothing else in Irish history for seven hundred years.
"We have our supplies at regular intervals, and our local commanders, with each province fully organized under them, and a complete system of code messages which never go through the post, but are distributed by means of secret dispatch-riders, and if the signal went forth to-night, to-morrow morning the whole of Ireland would be up in arms."