Normally Sinn Feiners and Orangemen were men of peace, the one economists, the other business men, who might indeed have been easily pacified had they been openly and sympathetically treated with, instead of being galled into fury by the taunt of bluff or cowardice, and such epithets as insignificant, negligible minorities.
In an orgy of majority government both stood out for the sanctity of minorities, especially when those minorities represented inviolable principles of vital import to the majority.
It was the method of suppression that really did most of the mischief, for in addition to casualties and damages there was also considerable distress, and it at once became necessary to organize a system of food distribution and relief for the sufferers.
This was largely undertaken by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, under Sir Henry Robinson, Vice-President of the Local Government Board, and with the help of the military authorities, who lent motor-lorries and money, food was distributed to over one hundred thousand persons.
House-to-house visitations were made, and these revealed all forms of distress, from lack of food, which, of course, it had been impossible to obtain as long as the city was in a state of siege, down to absolute ruination of whole families.
In places the city looked like Antwerp during the siege, or London upon the arrival of the Belgian refugees.
No one has yet been able to estimate the full extent of the material damage sustained by the reckless bombardment of the city—for no other word can be used; and though Captain Purcell, the chief of the Dublin Fire Brigade, gave the rough figure of £2,500,000, this must be taken as a mere minimum of the extent covered by the conflagrations.
It cannot represent the loss of business, employment, goodwill, trade, and the thousand and one other losses inseparable from such a catastrophe.
Take, for example, the loss of the Royal Hibernian Academy, with thousands of pounds of pictures. No price can repay these, for they represented perhaps the culminating point, or at least the turning point, in careers which had had years of hard struggles, and which had set perhaps a lifetime's hopes upon a single canvas.