Sir Nevil Macready had reached Ireland in a ship of
war in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and we can hardly doubt that the change of policy was largely due to him. What we complain of is not by any means that the prisoners, who would otherwise have died, should have been released, but that the Government should not have thought out their policy clearly from the beginning. One might suppose that all the experience that a British Govern- ment had with the suffragettes at the most violent period of the suffragette agitation had happened in another planet Nothing seems to have been learned. During that agitation public feeling, although entirely antagonistic' to the violence of the name gettes, was also antagonistic to the' idea of: these women being allowed to kill themselveein prison.. In response to that feeling the Government of the day invented -what was called the Cat and Mouse Act. When hunger-striking prisoners had made themselves sufficiently ill they were released, and they were or were -not subsequently rearrested as the Government thought fit.
