Sinn Fein could develop industry more easily if Ireland were free.[3] There is hope. It lies in Ireland's very lack of jobs. British labor does not like the competition of the cheap labor market next door. It rather welcomes the party that would push Irish industry. For with Irish industry developed Irish labor would become scarce and high. Already the British labor party has declared in favor of the self-determination of Ireland, and it is expected that with its accession to power there may be a final granting of self-determination to Ireland.
As we were leaving the Mansion House—to which some of us were invited to return to a reception for the delegates that evening—I found intense reaction to the speakers of the day. I asked a young American non-commissioned officer how he liked DeValera. He seemed to be as stirred by the name as the young members of DeValera's regiment who besiege Mrs. DeValera for some little valueless possession of the "chief's." The boy drew in his breath, and I expected him to let it out again in a flow of praise, but emotion seemed to get the better of him, and all he could manage was a fervent: "Oh, gee!" Then I came across young Sylvia Pankhurst, disowned by her family for her communist sympathies, and in Dublin for the purpose of persuading the Irish parliament to become soviet. The Irish speakers, she told me, were much to be preferred to the Americans. They used more figures and less figures of speech. And when I repeated her remark to Desmond Fitzgerald, a pink and fastidious member of parliament, he smilingly commented: "Well, we Irish are more sophisticated, aren't we?"
THE MAILED FIST
In the afternoon the curtain went up on a matinee performance of The Mailed
Fist.
The first act was in the home of Madame Gonne-McBride. It was, properly, an exposition of the power of the enemy.
With Madame Gonne-McBride, once called the most beautiful woman in Europe, Sylvia Pankhurst, and the sister, of Robert Barton, I entered the big house on Stephen's Green. Modern splashily vivid wall coloring. Japanese screens. Ancient carved madonnas. Two big Airedales thudded up and down in greeting to their mistress. I spoke of their unusual size.
Madame Gonne-McBride, taking the head of one of them between her hands:
"They won't let any one arrest me again, will they?"
She is tall and slim in her deep mourning—her husband was killed in the rebellion of 1916. Her widow's bonnet is a soft silky guipure lace placed on her head like a Red Cross worker's coif. On the breast of her black gown there hangs a large dull silver cross. Beggars and flower-sellers greet her by name. It is said that a large part of her popularity is due to her work in obtaining free school lunches. Anyway, there was great grief among the people when she was thrown into jail for supposed complicity in the unproved German plot. The arrest, she said, came one Sunday night. She was walking unconcernedly from one of George Russell's weekly gatherings, when five husky constables blocked the bridge road and hurried her off to jail. At last, on account of her ill health, she was released from prison—very weak and very pale.
Enter seventeen-year-old Sean McBride. Places back against the door. Blue eyes wide. Breathlessly: "They're after Bob Barton and Michael Collins. They've surrounded the Mansion House."
Hatless we raced across Stephen's Green—that little handkerchief of a park that never seemed so embroidered with turns and bridges and bandstands and duck ponds before. Through the crowd that had already gathered we edged our way till we came to the double line of bayonets and batons that guarded the entrance to Dawson street. Over the broad, blue shoulder of the policeman directly in front of me, I glimpsed a wicked-looking little whippet tank with two very conscious British officers just head and shoulders out. Still further down were three covered motor lorries that had been used to convey the soldiers.