What is the Sinn Fein remedy for unemployment?  Industry.  Plans were then under way for DeValera to make his escape to America to obtain American capital to back Irish industry.  But money was not to be his sole business.  He was to work for the recognition of Irish consuls and Irish mercantile marine.  And inside Ireland the movement to establish industry on a sound basis was going on.  Irish banks, Irish courts, Irish schools are to sustain the movement.  At present the English-controlled Irish banks handicap Irish entrepreneurs by charging them one per cent more interest than English banks charge English borrowers; therefore, a national bank is regarded as an imperative need.  Decisions of British judges in Irish courts may hamper Irish industry; so in parts of the country perfectly legal courts of arbitration manned by Irishmen have been established.  School children under the present system of education are trained neither to commerce nor to love of the development of their native land; accordingly a Sinn Fein school fund is now being collected so that the Irish parliament may soon be able to take over national education.

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.