As to Pearse, I do not know how to place him, nor what to say of him.  If there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he also.  I never could “touch” or sense in him the qualities which other men spoke of, and which made him military commandant of the rising.  None of these men were magnetic in the sense that Mr. Larkin is magnetic, and I would have said that Pearse was less magnetic than any of the others.  Yet it was to him and around him they clung.

Men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about which they may group themselves, and I think that Pearse became the leader because his temperament was more profoundly emotional than any of the others.  He was emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious way, and one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed.

He had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act differently to their own desires and interests.  His schoolmasters did not always receive their salaries with regularity.  The reason that he did not pay them was the simple one that he had no money.  Given by another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so logical that even a child could comprehend it.  These masters did not always leave him.  They remained, marvelling perhaps, and accepting, even with stupefaction, the theory that children must be taught, but that no such urgency is due towards the payment of wages.  One of his boys said there was no fun in telling lies to Mr. Pearse, for, however outrageous the lie, he always believed it.  He built and renovated and improved his school because the results were good for his scholars, and somehow he found builders to undertake these forlorn hopes.

It was not, I think, that he “put his trust in God,” but that when something had to be done he did it, and entirely disregarded logic or economics or force.  He said—­such a thing has to be done and so far as one man can do it I will do it, and he bowed straightaway to the task.

It is mournful to think of men like these having to take charge of bloody and desolate work, and one can imagine them say, “Oh! cursed spite,” as they accepted responsibility.

CHAPTER XI

        Labourand the insurrection.

No person in Ireland seems to have exact information about the Volunteers, their aims, or their numbers.  We know the names of the leaders now.  They were recited to us with the tale of their execution; and with the declaration of a Republic we learned something of their aim, but the estimate of their number runs through the figures ten, thirty, and fifty thousand.  The first figure is undoubtedly too slender, the last excessive, and something between fifteen and twenty thousand for all Ireland would be a reasonable guess.