divided and each local commandant seemed to decide the policy of his district. When I went down to Galway two rival garrisons were to be seen facing one another in this small country town. The only difference was that the regulars wore crossed shoulder straps and smoked Irish cigarettes: the irregulars had the straps vertical and commandeered 'Players'. I believe De Valera was making carefully staged progresses through the country. If a meeting did not promise to be a full one it was cancelled. But it was rather apparent that a large body of opinion was holding back and waiting on events. On the other hand it was becoming increasingly evident that De Valera could never count on more than a minority of the electorate. All these things stretched him on the rack of doubt and indecision. He had thoroughly enjoyed the pomp of office in America, and although he had vowed to quit public life if the Treaty passed, he still clung to the scene, and men remembered that he had vowed not to survive Terry McSweeny, but was still taking his regular meals. He was said to be studying Machiavelli to find light in his difficulties, and certainly the attempts made to line up the nation in a united cause were subtle enough.

The first step was to secure a temporary truce between the factions by an agreed panel of candidates for the forthcoming elections. It certainly appeared as if De Valera talked over Michael Collins on this occasion. The latter made a speech in which he seemed to be using the words De Valera had put in his mouth. Stability of the country was the mot d'ordre; and certainly instability has been the Republican ticket since its defeat at the polls. But this truckling to trouble-makers caused considerable apprehension in the country. It made it increasingly difficult to deal with bank-robbers. It prolonged an interregnum when there was no particular government and no particular authority in many parts of the country.

Meantime the other side of the policy was developing. The readjustment of the boundary had already been a subject of discussion between Collins and the Ulster premier. The 'big man' on one occasion had used big words, in fact had talked about the big stick. Ulster had replied by bringing in

Sir Henry Wilson and reorganizing her forces. The extremists of the I.R.A. evidently meditated a coup in Ulster. Penetration of areas with a Nationalist majority, the fomenting of local trouble, an imbroglio into which the whole country would eventually be drawn, these were the designed stages of the policy. There was all along ample justification in the perpetual vendetta which religious strife engendered in Belfast.

The plan of campaign which had been so successful in the first throwing off of British authority, when the latter's hands were tied by political and international complications, when it would never do to admit how bad things were in Ireland, failed hopelessly from the first with Ulster, which had no hesitation in waging war with the same weapons. To make this quite clear I will repeat the phenomena as they occurred. There was the ever present feud between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster, a feud in which, the latter being in the majority, the former were usually the victims. Just because the Treaty finally separated the northern Nationalists from their southern brethren, the matter now came to a head.1 Collins was seeking to find a solution in a readjustment of the boundary which would eat a great hole in the Ulster territory. The DeValera-ites hoped to perpetuate the situation and convert it into an impasse. The Ulster government were faced with the prospect of an underground warfare in two counties, with an ingress of I.R.A. soldiers from the south, and a state of affairs which would soon reduce their rule to impotence. Moreover, it is impossible to deal with guerilla warfare by ordinary police methods, or even with a reinforced police. Wilson met it by virtually declaring war on the Catholic population. Probably in most cases the objects of this attack were known as active Nationalists, but hideous deeds were done in the process of clearing Ulster of potential rebels to the new administration-and in some cases they provoked equally hideous retaliation. The Irish papers spoke bitterly of pogroms, and pogroms there were, but they succeeded in their purpose, and once the danger was removed, the persecution ceased.

1It is worth remembering that in the 1915 election Nationalist candidates did not appear as Sinn Fein candidates but under the old party title. This suggests a majority of those who would favour a modus vivendi with their neighbours, only a minority perhaps of intransigents.

A curious little incident not quite understood at the time was the Pettigo affair. I.R.A. forces were facing the Ulster troops along the border, and apparently a raid was intended at this point, perhaps on a big scale. British troops occupied the Pettigo salient which commanded the railway approach on Londonderry, and a screen of British troops was thrown along the border between the rival Irish forces. The I.R.A. hopes were thus nipped in the bud. Michael Collins, after one gesture of objection made no further move in the matter. It must have been fully demonstrated to him what the justification of the British action was.

A month in Connemara took me rather outside the fever of politics. Here governments and rulers might come and go without making much ultimate difference to this primitive people. Still one got an idea of the facilities the country gave for guerrilla warfare. The bridges were in some cases still broken down as they had been in the struggle with the Black and Tans, just enough being left standing to allow pedestrians to pass, or an ass with a sack of flour on his back. The scene most familiar to my eyes, an inlet of the sea with green hills dappled with rock rising around it, presented a deceptive appearance. It seemed at first sight a place of extraordinarily dense population. But house after house, cottage after cottage, I was told, had been long empty. Every family had representatives in America. Several girls in the village had been in the States and come home again and expected to go back shortly. The universal depression and the rigours of semi-warfare had hit them hard here. This was favourite fishing ground for wealthy sportsmen-it was-but the sportsmen had stayed away the last few years, all except a few imperturbable English half-pay officers who rightly gauged that if they kept to their own ways they were quite welcome to spend their money in the country. But a strange feature of the landscape was big black motor trucks of the American white cross distributing relief around the country. Every cottage made cloth and would offer you rolls of homespun at

2Since the official title of the army was the I.R.A., it was difficult to tell whether they were official or unofficial troops, Free State or mutineers or simply the army on the spot.

one and two dollars a yard. A niece of mine had tried a very interesting experiment in starting an industry. She bought wool in Yorkshire, where best it is bought, and taught the village girls to make wool rugs. She paid them and then sold the rugs. They worked furiously, once they had mastered the art; in fact it would seem as if the whole family laboured at it, the one teaching the other. One of the big Dublin stores gave her a window for an exhibit for a month and sold at a commission, while the neighbouring sporting hotels did the same, but the later trouble held up this plucky little enterprise.

The inhabitants were making up for the deficit of labour in what way they could. Potheen, it was said, was being made extensively; and sometimes coming over the bog from one little lake to another, in the search for that elusive piece of water that held the 'big uns', one would see the tell-tale circle of big stones under a steep bank with a blackened layer of ashes underneath. There is no fuel problem here, with miles and miles of peat blocking up the whole country. A long trench is cut each side of the patch to be 'mined'. This gives the preliminary draining. Then it is cut with the curious long, narrow spades, the top sod being first removed. The slabs, rather smaller than a small loaf, are placed on end in little pyramids with a horizontal one on top and thus dry effectually. The 'turfs' are then stacked by the road in long low ricks and brought into the village when needed. Tribal ways obtain in the cutting of the turf. My host had given his factotum an order to get a gang of boys to cut and stack peat from a certain bog. The next day an indignant deputation from the hamlet of Bunnahone came with the accusation that having duly arrived on the bog they had been rejected in favour of the youth of Derry. The factotum's name was Maloney, and his wages bill when handed in showed payments made to seventeen of the tribe of Maloney and three of the tribe of O'Laughlin- – and the O'Laughlins were relatives by marriage!

The elections seemed a thing very remote. We received a paper by post daily and that was the only link with the outer world. As polling day drew near a divergence of opinion arose between Collins and Valera on the pact they had made. The latter considered that the panel should stand and any other

candidates should be deprecated, frowned on and Michael Collins took a much more airy view of the situation. Any other interest that wished to be represented was free to do so. Consequently Labour and Farmer candidates were freely nominated and a number of Independents appeared who were often prominent business men: where they figured the Unionists knew how to vote. This was sufficient to upset the balance of power; and although in the elections (held under proportional representation) only the last candidate dropped out this was frequently an Anti-Treaty-ite. The Valera party in Parliament was reduced to a faction. Miss McSweeny in Cork only got in at the foot of the poll. There was, it was said, considerable personation and much intimidation. This, however, was not entirely a novel feature in Irish politics. If Michael Collins had been looked on with suspicion by the Anti-Treaty-ites before the election, he was now considered to be a double-dyed traitor.

Being out of Ireland at the moment of the outbreak in Dublin followed by civil war in the country, I am not in a position to say much more about it than any close student of the daily press. On the Republican side were the youth3 who sought to emulate the heroic gesture of 1916, those who had suffered and been embittered in the Black and Tan régime, theorists so much the victims of their hopes that they thought one more insistence would yield them their uttermost demand. Lastly there were dissatisfied politicians, among which number is to be reckoned perhaps De Valera himself. I saw an extract from a publicity sheet of the Republicans which claimed that operations in Dublin were only for the purpose of holding the Free State forces while the Republicans concentrated behind their line-of-defence in the west. However that may be, the Free State was obviously not prepared for operations on so considerable a scale, especially as they could not afford to lose prestige by a doubtful struggle: they had however material resources, they procured artillery from Britain, and they had command of the sea.

"It might happen, for example, for a Free State father to find that he was harbouring in his garage enough gelignite to blow up a whole quarter of the city, and the only practicable resource to be that of locking the door, losing the key and trying to close his mind to the consequences.