attempted to account for the fact that many gallons of this oil were transferred on credit to little shopkeepers, who, of course, by the purest coincidence, happened to be in the local shibboleth, "Warm Sinn Féiners," I have met several of these gentry domiciled at Valentia, Balliskell Bay, and Waterville, where are grouped the eastern ends of the cables which link Europe with the American Continent. Inland, their most prominent leaders in Kerry are established in Tralee and Killarney.

These are the same inconsolables, or their sons, who, as members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or as organizers of "moonlighting," came under my notice when, many years ago, I was, with the late General Sir Redvers Buller and General Sir Alfred Turner, engaged in breaking up the reign of terror then rampant in Munster. Their activity was then confined to the shooting and boycotting of unpopular landlords and tenants. During the last year it has found expression in the making of an unholy alliance with the godless iconoclasts and enemies of their faith who destroyed Rheims Cathedral, the heart of Catholic France, and reduced Ypres to ashes-Ypres, where the historic banners of the Irish Brigade remained in the keeping of the Irish

nuns.

Petrol has been passed on to various depôts on the Kerry coast line, it being just eleven months since that stimulating game came into fashion. It has now been scotched, if not entirely stamped out. Many of those engaged in it have, with the assistance of German money, quitted Ireland for the States with such celerity that their exodus might, with strict propriety, be termed a flight.

At present, it is in regard to the antienlistment campaign among the small farming classes that the influence of the

Sinn Féin is exercising itself in its most pernicious form.

I write with a somewhat intimate knowledge of Irish political secret societies, and I am convinced that the young farmer element will continue to ignore our life and death struggle for national existence until drastic action is taken to muzzle the Berlin subsidized propaganda of that organization which has adopted for one of the passwords among its brethren, "Burn everything English but English coals."

It is not the few rifles and ammunition of the Sinn Féin, captured in Dublin the other day, which really mean anything sinister, for the organization can never procure more than a contemptible tale of arms, but the real danger lies in the word which is being passed round among the tillers of the soil.

On March 3d and 4th of this year the Irish Race Convention was held in New York. The object of this assemblage was to make a pronouncement upon the racial attitude on the war. That attitude was summed up by two Irish-American Sinn Féiners. One, Judge Goff, of New York, said we have only one supreme interest, and that is to see, by fair means or foul, England defeated. And, said Mr. P. Hugh O'Donnell, a Chicago millionaire, "I want to see the power of England broken on land and sea" (a voice, “We have got our own submarines"). "It is treason to our race for any Catholic Irishman to enlist in the English Army or to help recruiting for it. . .

"Brethren you will be gratified to hear that our friends in the Old Country have killed the work of the British recruiting sergeant among the tillers of the soil, the true wealth of Ireland."

The last day's proceedings of this Convention of misguided patriots was brought to a conclusion by the singing of "God Save Ireland" and ominous cries of "We will at last avenge the

Manchester Martyrs."

(Query, with the newly-acquired submarine?) What seems preposterous is this myth that a successful conclusion for Germany of the greatest of all international throatcuttings would mean a victory for Ireland, and the even greater myth that the way to help Ireland in acquiring her just rights is to keep on nourishing the old legacy of hate and revenge. The charges that the Irish can bring against England for her treatment of them in the past are the most deadly that one European nation can bring against another. English selfishness and stupidity sacrificed the healthy development of the Irish people. The pathology of Ireland is known all over America and our Colonial Empire as England's responsibility, her shame, her disgrace. But what the Sinn Féin seem incapable of comprehending is that the question now is not the responsibility for that pathology-it is the cure. And I would, with infinite respect, suggest to the Sinn Féin that the way to cure Erin is no more by helping to aid in Britain's defeat than the way to cure a legacy of gout is by murdering the present descendant of your, great-grandfather's wine merchant.

The entire history of Irish revolutionary secret societies is associated with the fact, more than once illustrated in Ireland in a sanguinary and sensational manner, that they invariably include inner circles which stop at no crime to attain their purposes. The most extreme section of the Sinn Féin is known, within the ranks of the organization, as the Cumaan Na Gadhael. The membership of its branches or sections is numerically small, particular care being taken as to the antecedents of those admitted. Each member has his individual number, which he gives as a password before being admitted to any of the meetings of this inner circle. The candidate for admission-an ap

proved Sinn Féiner-takes a solemn oath never to reveal the names of any of the members, and he is informed that the society inside a society is composed of resolute Irishmen banded together to establish an independent Ireland, the just necessary step for which is to aid in the defeat of England in the present war. And that aid, it is explained, is most usefully applied to an anti-recruiting campaign.

Then the following ruthless pledge is administered:

"I,, hereby solemnly swear and make oath, before the Most High God, before whom I expect to be judged, that I will seek out and leave no means untried to exterminate, as foes of the liberty of my country, any West Briton or West Britons who shall induce my fellow-countrymen to enlist in the army of England."

"West Briton," it may be observed, is the contemptuous shibboleth of the Sinn Féiner for an Irish loyalist. No Irish-born recruiting agents have so far been assassinated, and I am inclined to believe that this inner circle oath is not seriously meant, being rather a formula the known existence of which may be used as an intimidatory

weapon.

Yet although this organization is pledged to deter Irishmen from reinforcing the British Forces and has resorted to intimidation in the carrying out of that object, backed up by the threat of assassination, there remains the comforting knowledge that His Majesty's Government are not called upon at this eventful moment to deal with a much more formidable conspiracy to wit, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Fenian movement (the I.R.B.) of the 'sixties never achieved the distinction of a national upheaval. But, as a military organization, officered by veterans from both sides in the great American Civil struggle, it unquestionably would have

done so had Britain at the time been engaged in a European war. According to a statement made in the House of Commons by the then Chief Secretary for Ireland, the late Sir Robert Peel, there were more than a thousand IrishAmerican officers, from generals to subalterns, engaged in training throughout the country the rank and file of the I.R.B. And the commander-in-chief of the rebel army in the making was a very efficient French soldier of fortune, General Clauseret, formerly of the Federal forces under Maclenen and Grant, and who wound up his firebrand career as "Minister of War" of the Paris Communists. Had such a position of affairs existed at this crisis of the Empire's history, it is conceivable that we might have lost, temporarily, possession of the west and southwestern Irish littoral. And that coastline contains a succession of small, deeply-indented harbors studded with islands, forming ideal bases for the "poussiere navale," the enemy's destroyers, torpedo boats, and submarines. Thus established at our very gates, with a hostile Irish hinterland to provide shelter and refreshment, the enemy would have it in their power to stop abruptly British commerce from both the Western and Southern Atlantic and no little of that from the Mediterranean.

So all is not barren from Dan to Beersheba.

In 1867 a prison van containing the Fenians, Colonel Kelly and Captain Dacey, was surrounded by a party of their compatriots, the guards overpowered, and the door blown open by a pistol shot through the keyhole, which accidentally slew a police sergeant. Five of the rescuers were captured, tried, and sentenced to death. The evidence was tainted and was soon proved to be utterly untrustworthy. But the manifest wish of the I.R.B. to involve us in a foreign war as well as civil commotion had alarmed the whole English people.

This Manchester episode gave that alarm a tinge of ferocity. Captain Condon, sometime of Meade's Division, at Vicksburg, on being sentenced, advanced to the front of the dock and, raising his right hand, cried, “God save Ireland."

It is impossible to forget the impression that the execution of the three "Manchester Martyrs" produced upon the lower middle and working classes of the people of Ireland. A few days after this example of misplaced vigorone that has done more than any other event in the last half-century to keep alive the spirit of fanaticism among Irish extremists-a song was written and sung to the accompaniment of the American war chantey, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," with the refrain uttered from the dock, "God save Ireland"; and whenever, in any part of the globe, there is now an assemblage of Nationalist Patlanders, social or political, a concert in Cork or a St. Patrick's Day dinner in Calcutta, the proceedings regularly close with the crash of the "Irish Marseillaise."

When a branch of the Sinn Féin disperses after, with passionate fervor, joining in that heart-wringing refrain

"Close beneath the gallows tree, Kissed like brothers lovingly, True to home, faith, and freedom to the last,"

and violated the cloistered hearths of the ancient faith?

And are they "true to freedom," these sons of the Isle which through The English Review.

long centuries has fought for freedom, when they would welcome to their shores Teutonic Imperialism, materialism, and -ah, yes, and Teutonic slavery?

The already deep and growing interest in Russian literature has been greatly stimulated by the present war, and fresh translations of Russian novels are being poured forth, in rapid succession, from the press. Of these none are more welcome, or more important, than the complete edition of Dostoevsky's works which Mrs. Garnett has been giving us at intervals during the past four years. Russian critics have awarded this writer the first place amongst their novelists, and they tell us that from no one else can we gain such a true insight into the national soul. It is indeed a new and strange world to which the Western reader is introduced by these books, but nevertheless he is conscious that fresh scenes and altered conditions only serve to bring into clearer light the unchanging and universal characteristics of human nature. Dostoevsky was the most ardent and convinced of nationalists, but he regarded the strength of Russian nationalism as the aspiration towards a universal spirit which should embrace all mankind. "To be a real Russian," said he, "means only this: to be a brother to all men, to be universally human." He, at any rate, was true to this ideal. Through his marvelous representations of Russian life and character, he discovers to us the elemental facts of life as we all know it. Thus while we find in his stories a

*The Novels of Dostoevsky. Translated by Constance Garnett. 7 volumes ready. (Heinemann.) 1913-6.

Dostoevsky's Works. Five selected vols. (In Everyman's Library.) (Dent & Co.)

The Letters of Dostoevsky. Translated by E. C. Mayne. (Chatto & Windus.) 1914.

Tolstoy as Man and Artist, with an Essay on Dostoevsky. By Dmitri Merejkowski. (Constable & Co.) 1902.

mirror of "the soul of Russia," it is what he has to reveal about our own souls that makes the strongest appeal

to us.

"Raskolnikov is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years: I am glad you took to it. Many find it dull. Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikov was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the center; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified."

This fine appreciation of Crime and Punishment, which occurs in one of Stevenson's letters to J. A. Symonds, might justly be extended to each of Dostoevsky's chief works. The last clause, which reminds us of Aristotle's description of Tragedy as "purging through pity and fear," indicates the point of view from which these books should be approached. Other writers picture the external aspects of life, describing the accidents of fortune and the more obvious revelations of character. Dostoevsky explores the depths of human nature, searching out the subtle influences and hidden powers which mightily affect the spirit and *R. L. Stevenson: Letters, Vol. II, page 20.

fill life with amazing possibilities. He was charged with being "fantastic," and "lacking in universality." Turgenev barbed the criticism with a sneer at his "psychological mole-runs.' Dostoevsky emphatically repudiated the accusation. "They call me a psychologist," he writes; "it is not true, I am only a realist in the highest sense of the word, i. e., I depict all the soul's depths." And again, with special reference to The Idiot, he says:-"What most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the inmost essence of truth. And observation of everyday trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realismit is quite the reverse. In any newspaper one takes up, one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts, which nevertheless strike one as extraordinary. Our writers regard them as fantastic, and take no account of them, and yet they are the truth. . . . Is not my fantastic "Idiot" the very dailiest truth?"

It is in such "realism" that Dostoevsky's power lies, and of necessity it led him to study humanity at its worst. He deals with dark and shameful phases of life, but not that he may minister to a morbid curiosity. His only purpose in investigating the maladies of diseased and wounded souls is to discover the source of healing. For this reason his books never leave the taint in the reader's mind that is inseparable from some novels of the "realistic" school. It is not a Madame Tussaud's "Chamber of Horrors" which they exhibit to us, but a moral hospital where the skill shown in diagnosing disease is equaled by the compassion with which the sufferers are treated. Indeed, Dostoevsky's unfailing attitude to men is that of one of his finest characters, Father Zossima, who told his young disciple, Alyosha Karamazov, "to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and

for some of them as one would for the sick in hospitals."

When Dostoevsky began to deal with the sickness of the soul, he soon found the root of the matter to be the old trouble of the "war in the members," or, in psychological phrase, "the divided self." Something of this conflict is doubtless felt in all lives, but when the strife becomes so intense that the spirit is torn and agonized by it, then the normal experience is lifted to the height of great tragedy. This is what Dostoevsky shows us, as he strips his characters of every vestige of artificiality and convention, and reveals the springs of desire and action.

Dostoevsky discovered the problem of the divided self, first of all, in the depths of his own personality. Writing to his brother, at the age of twenty-four, he admits the disorderly way in which he is living and the neurotic and helpless state to which his dissoluteness has reduced him. About the same time he wrote Letters from the Underworld, and it is hardly possible to resist the impression that the painful confessions the book contains are, to some extent, at any rate, a self-revelation of its author. "Every day," says the imaginary writer of the letters, "I keep discovering in myself elements of the most opposite order conceivable, and can feel them swarming within me, and am aware that, to the very end of my life, they will continue so to swarm. . At the very moment when I have appeared to be most in a position to appreciate the finer shades of "the great and the beautiful" I have not only invariably failed to recognize as unseemly, but also have never failed to commit actions which-well, in a word, actions which all men commit, but which I have always perpetrated just when I was most acutely sensible that I ought not to do them. The more I have recognized what is good . . . the deeper I have plunged into the mire,