who have been hanged or imprisoned for serious crime, and it is alleged that these are among the many innocent victims of British savagery. In short, nothing is omitted which can serve to distort the facts of the situation or to inflame passion. It is commonly believed that one of the chief directors of this propaganda policy is an Englishman of some literary reputation, who was concerned in the Howth gun-running, and who for some reason best known to the Irish executive has been permitted to live in Dublin, where his house is a centre of treason.

The official figures show that between Jan. 1 and June 11 of the present year, 322 soldiers and policemen have been killed and 450 wounded. It is stated, although not officially, that the civilian casualties, which include not only members of the Irish Republican Army but persons who have been killed or wounded accidentally by stray shots, include 567 deaths for the same period. This is probably not far from the truth, and the figures show that the death roll becomes more terrible every week. In the week ending June 6, no less than 24 soldiers and police were killed in Ireland. The situation has in many respects grown much worse since General Macready and Sir Hamar Greenwood accepted their present positions in April 1920. It is right to add that their policy has succeeded in certain directions. Sinn Fein Courts are no longer held with impunity, nor do hunger strikers now bring the law into contempt; and the railway men have been compelled to do their duty in handling all kinds of material, including munitions of war. This is on the one side. On the other, the murders of soldiers, policemen, and loyalists occur with a more appalling frequency than before; and the terrorism of the countryside is making many parts of Ireland uninhabitable for those who will not avow themselves in sympathy with the Irish Republican Army.

These are the main facts of the present situation. But something must now be said of the principles lying behind the policy of repression which has failed, in the main, to restore order and peace. The Government has generally taken it for granted that Britain is not at war with Southern Ireland, but that all the disorder which prevails

is due to a comparatively small section of the population, who must be punished, as criminals are punished by every civilised community. The result of this too optimistic idea is that, on the one side, the Sinn Feiners consider themselves as at war with the military and police (although, as has been said, they do not restrict themselves by the conventions of civilised warfare); while the British soldier is told that he is not at war with Irish people, for the King cannot be at war with his own subjects, and that he must be careful not to hurt any unconvicted person. Hence, a 'soldier of the Irish Republic,' dressed in civilian clothes, deems himself as playing an honourable part when he shoots at a street corner an officer who is looking the other way, and then, dropping his revolver, strolls off undetected, save by passers-by too terrified to speak. But a policeman who meets a Sinn Feiner, well known to be a fugitive from justice and guilty of a dozen crimes, must not think of shooting; he must arrest his man, if he can, and only fire in self-defence. The culprit must be tried by due process of law, and not shot or maltreated before trial.

This is, of course, an intolerable condition of affairs. It gives an overwhelming advantage to the criminal. And it was inevitable that it should have been resented by the Auxiliary Police whom we sent to Ireland to preserve order last year. Most of them had seen active service in the Great War. They were accustomed, on the one hand, to hard and stern fighting; and, on the other, to the observance of the conventions of civilised warfare. They found themselves serving in a country where every hedge might conceal an enemy, and where an innocent-looking civilian counted it honourable to shoot them at sight. It proved too much for the discipline of some, and in a few cases-fewer than the skilful Sinn Fein propaganda alleged-they indulged in reprisals in kind, partly with the desire to revenge their murdered comrades, partly because they found such reprisals for the moment a deterrent to crime. Every one must condemn such conduct; but it is easy to understand it. An instructive parallel may be found in the Irish history of the 18th century. In his endeavours to repress the Defenders, Lord Carhampton took the law into his own hands and connived at reprisals and illegal punishments,

which were justly condemned by right-thinking men. But an apology for him was addressed to the Lord Lieutenant of the day, which is worth recalling. If it please your Excellency,' wrote a pamphleteer of 1798, to permit them [i.e. the rebels] to go to war with us, and will only permit us to go to law with them, it will not require the second sight of a Scotchman to foretell the issue.'* That was exactly the situation in Ireland at the end of last year; and that it strained the discipline of the police to breaking point is not surprising.

These unauthorised reprisals had very untoward consequences. In the first case, they confused the minds of many people-and still confuse them-as to the moral issues involved. They were skilfully exaggerated by the Sinn Fein press. They were fully reported in the British press, when the murders of soldiers and police were ignored or treated as mere incidents in an unfortunate campaign. They aroused the sympathy of sentimental but ill-informed ecclesiastics, and provided the opponents of His Majesty's Government with a text upon which they were not slow to enlarge. Certainly, it is true that a man wearing the King's uniform does very wrong if he murders his supposed enemies in cold blood, or if he burns their houses without authority, or if he steals their property. And, unhappily, suspicions prevailed that such crimes on the part of the Black and Tans' were not always punished by their officers as swiftly or as severely as they ought to have been punished. Accordingly, the Sinn Fein papers, after their manner, spoke of organised' attempts on behalf of the Irish Executive to terrorise the population by unlawful and immoral acts. All this did untold mischief, for it diverted attention from the central fact of the situation that murder was rampant in Ireland, and that those who encouraged murder were primarily responsible for the outrages which murder provoked.

Happily the discipline of the police has been much stricter during the last four months, and their conduct has of late been marked by an honourable restraint becoming British troops. Reprisals' of the kind that have been under discussion are now so rare as to be

Lecky, 'History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century,' III, 421.

negligible to any serious observer who wishes to appreciate the situation as a whole. But the reprisals from October to February have left a bitter memory, and did much to enlist on the Sinn Fein side many who had formerly kept aloof from violence.

Quite a different criticism must be passed on certain military measures which are sometimes described as 'official reprisals.' It has often happened that an ambush has been laid for British troops in places where it was quite certain that the inhabitants must have connived at its preparation. And, in some cases, large buildings such as creameries-which in times of peace have been so great a benefit to the rural districts in Ireland-have been used as places of rendezvous for rebel forces, or for those who control their operations. The military authorities decided that exemplary punishment must be inflicted on such localities. And they have burned a large number of houses, to teach their inhabitants that to connive at, or acquiesce in, the murder of British soldiers is a grave crime. There is nothing unethical here. No law of God or man forbids the State to punish an offender in his property or in his person. But the selection of this particular form of punishment has been very unwise. It is uneconomic, for it has destroyed property which it will be very difficult to replace. And, moreover, such official burnings have been regularly followed by the burning by the rebels of mansions and country houses of twenty times the value of the poor dwellings destroyed as a punishment. Arson is impossible to prevent, without the presence of a very much larger military force than could ever be sent to Ireland. And 'competition in arson,' as one of the most violent critics of the Government described it, is a foolish and reckless policy. As this article is being written, the newspapers hint that official reprisals' of this kind are to be abandoned. We hope that it may be so, for they merely embitter a situation already bad enough.

Reprisals, ethical or unethical, official or unofficial, whether the act of the State or the act of the undisciplined individual, have had this further grave consequence, that they have provided the Roman Catholic priesthood with a welcome text, from which they may preach hatred of Britain, rather than condemnation of

murder. No Irish bishop or priest, we would hope and believe, would consciously encourage murder; and some members of the hierarchy, to their credit, have proclaimed an unqualified condemnation of it. But the responsibility that rests on these spiritual leaders is very serious; for, again and again, they have seemed in their public utterances to condemn with more emphasis and with less reservation the repressive measures of the Government than the sin and crime which called these measures into existence. A typical instance was the pronouncement of the bishops assembled at Maynooth last October, under the presidency of Cardinal Logue. Here was a very long, considered statement, issued by the highest spiritual authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, devoted exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of British ministers, and issued at a time when all Ireland was aghast at the murders which were being committed by members of their own flocks. The 'reign of frightfulness' established by Crown forces in Ireland has a parallel,' according to these ecclesiastics, 'only in the horrors of Turkish atrocities or in the outrages of the Red Army of Bolshevist Russia.' The only hint, in this hysterical appeal, that there was any wrongdoing on the part of the Irish people was contained in the sentence, 'Needless to say, we are opposed to crime from whatever side it comes.' The moral danger that resides in such official pronouncements is appalling, and there have been too many of them.

The plain truth, however distasteful it may be to admit it, is that the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland are losing control of their people; and that they are trying to retain their outward allegiance by refraining from any pronouncement which may irritate or alienate the members of their flock. There are notable exceptions; Dr Cohalan of Cork, e.g., denounced the killing of policemen as mortal sin, although his threat of excommunication has not had much effect. But the policy of the Roman bishops in Ireland has been, for many years, to follow rather than to lead their people. They condoned the Plan of Campaign; they opposed conscription during the Great War; and now, very few of them have had the courage to say, tout court, that the killing of a policeman is murder, without accompanying this simple