and Sir John Simon showed them at their worst. One officer actually fainted in court and his cross-examination had to be suspended. Francis Sheehy Skeffington could not have imagined any more damning exposé of the militarism he detested and under which he perished, no writer of fiction could have imagined a more harrowing story of unrelieved brutality than may be found in the cold and lawyer-like language of the Simon Report. But all these officers still enjoy favor. Major Price still rules in Dublin Castle.
A martyr fights in death more terribly than many warring saints. He is entrenched, you cannot reach him with your heaviest shot. My husband would have gone to his death with a smile on his lips, knowing that by his murder he had struck a heavier blow for his ideals than by any act of his life. And I am willing to give him up on the altar of sacrifice, for I know that his death will speak trumpet-tongued against the system that slew him.
Nor was it, as I have shown, the one mad act of an irresponsible officer. It was part of an organized "pogrom." We possess evidence, sworn and duly attested, of at least 50 other murders of unarmed civilians or disarmed prisoners (some boys and some women) committed by the soldiers during Easter Week. The North Staffords murdered 14 men in North King street, and buried them in the cellars of their houses.
A coroner's jury of the city brought a verdict of wilful murder against these men who could be identified (Dublin's City Council) but Sir John Maxwell refused to give them up, and they are in Dublin at the present moment. Pits were dug in Glasnevin Cemetery and bodies piled up were carted off and buried in a common trench. In various cases the soldiers stated that they were under definite orders to kill civilians and prisoners. In Trinity College they so boasted.
Over three hundred houses were looted and sacked in the suburbs and the city. Thousands of men, hundreds of women, were arrested all over the country and deported in cattle boats to England, some to jails, some to internment camps. Most of these had no part whatever in the rising, but the police and soldiers had a free hand to arrest all, and exercised their powers to the full. Time does not permit me to dwell any longer on the treatment accorded to the prisoners. In Kilmainham, in Richmond and later in England, they were brutally ill-treated. Two instances, Mary O'Loughlin and
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