"What could have happened? You say 'Pillage and murder.' They were not out for that, in the first place, nor were they that type; and it may be questioned whether, had they set about it with deliberate purpose, they would have worked such havoc as the military and naval artillery wrought in that fatal week."
The theory is certainly one which would have had no precedent to recommend it, but to my mind it was just this that was its best recommendation; in fact, what was most needed was to avoid a repetition of the old fatal precedents which had turned so many futile revolts into glorious outbursts of patriotism.
Just imagine the situation. England would first of all have told them she wished for no bloodshed beyond the punishment of those who had actually shot defenceless men or whose orders had led to these murders. It would have redounded entirely to the credit of the Englishman.
England would then have asked the politicians and people alike if they in any way sympathized with such a revolt, and let the penalties be known—the immediate erasure of Home Rule from the Statute Book and the cessation of land purchase, as well as the stoppage of all commercial or financial transactions.
Finally, if these failed and the people of Ireland really wished for war in its full reality, they could have it, but they must not ever afterward appeal as constitutional partners in the Empire, but merely as a conquered race: mercy they might have, rights they would have forfeited by conquest.
Had such a course been followed, there would not only have been an opportunity upon the part of the nation at large to disown the usurpers, who would then have had not even the vestige of a grievance upon which to establish their preposterous claims to continuance in the position they had taken up.
In a word, the English would have made fools of them, or rather allowed the Irish to make fools of them. Instead of this, all the old fatal, discredited methods were employed with the same fatal results, and they became national heroes, whose suppression by force could only give them greater power.
The whole thing would have taken no longer than the campaign; no further blood would have been spilt, and time would have been allowed for the great adventure to reveal itself in the true grotesqueness of cold reality.
Possibly it was looked upon as infra dig. to treat with rebels, but it was so obviously a mental case that it is hard to see how anything could possibly have been infra dig. under such circumstances.
On Monday and Tuesday the Republic was no more representative of the people of Ireland than the tailors of Tooley Street were the people of England, but upon the old Grecian principle that the sufferings of one citizen are the sufferings of the whole State, it became national from the moment the national sentiment had been aroused by the indiscriminate shedding of blood.