E. is interested in idea of printing press, but it is impossible
to tell whether they would ever let him buy one. Endless
red tape. Not interested in any archaic black letter hand
printing. Have you electricity in the castle?

I don't suppose you ever went to the Orphan's print
shop in Rapallo. The smallest size electric press there
takes up very little room. Printing press probably should be
in a basement so as not to put weight on beams.
Whether there are any modern presses for sale in Italy,
or whether anyone has time to find out about prices,
all this would have to be learned. Whether there is any plan
of work, whether there would be enough work to hire
one of the orphans who has been trined to print. Whether
Marsano still exists or could be traced. The point is that
E's money can only be spent on needs or investment. So that
any way of getting at any quantity of it would have to
( on paper ) dressed up as an investment

Obviously you have all the work you can do. Arbeitswert.
man power hours and so on.

A seed packet has been ordered. Hope you get it in time
to use it this year. Drummond is said to be very busy,
E. doesn't know who could get you information about the
press or who would really want to work it if he is
allowed to buy one. Ar whether a professional like Marsano
would go to Meran and start commercial printing. Of course
he always wants news, particularly of people. And so far
as he can make out no one ever meets or looks up
anyone else. Exception : your visit to the Sig?a A.
and the Rome telegram.

Question about printing? what is there locally. E. worked
with both Felugo and the Orphans in Rapallo. But castle seems further
from any possible Merano work shop than the post office street
in Rapallo from v. Marsala. Question of temperament whether
one CAN CAN get on with workmen. Of course the agriculture
or garden MORE important than any machine work. But machine
can be worked in long evenings if anyone likes that sort of
amusement.

What could be done, sometime when it did not interfere with B's other
work, he might get a catlog or learn prices of small electric
presses. That couldn't do any harm. Though it might not lead to
anything. Also, of course, price of type, clear roman, not
italic or fancy.

## As Cocteau Sees Us

A distinguished French poet-playwright has been talking to me about America, about Hollywood, about New York. He said:

> "Some Europeans call New York oppressive. They claim the skyscrapers bear down heavily on their souls. How can that be true? Your skyscrapers are made of lace, patterned all over with lacy little holes where the windows are. Then again, the skyscrapers are beehives, and all the windows are openings to compartments in which the bees are making honey. The honey, the wealth, flows down from each compartment, down through the buildings, out into the streets. Your streets glisten with the honey of stylish clothes, furs, jewels, automobiles—the wealth made by your bees in their skyscraper hives."

Jean Cocteau is the poet who gave me this provocative description of New York. He was here for a few days on business concerning his latest movie, The Eagle With Two Heads. He's a lively conversationalist. I spent an interesting afternoon listening to his impressions of America revisited for the first time since the war.

> "Cities grow," he said, "but they do not change. We are the ones who change. Now I see America with smiling, open-faced people. In France we have closed faces now, a war aftermath. Americans wish to understand and admire new things. Here you have a richness that can't be counted in dollars—your richness of receptivity, your national talent for absorbing every new form of beauty that man can create."

He tramped the room as he talked. In one hand he had a bottle of milk, which he sipped through a straw. From praise he went on to criticism of Hollywood producers. "The big ones out there, they refuse to admit the American public is adult. Forever they want something new, yet they insist that nothing shall change."

Movies should cost less, says Cocteau, should be more experimental, use more young talent, of which this country has much. He said, "By always demanding assurance of financial success, your producers hang a curtain of gold between public interest and the new, experimental forms of the theater arts. True, the cost of labor is a problem, but I believe the unions would react favorably to educational approach."

From a hard-boiled business viewpoint, perhaps Cocteau is cockeyed on unpoetic matters, perhaps not.

—PRINCESS ALEXANDRA KROPOTKIN

# Ireland's New Man of Destiny

By JAMES P. O'DONNELL

What kind of man is this new champion who toppled wily old De Valera from power to proclaim the Republic of Ireland? An intimate introduction to Seán MacBride, who has replaced ancient hatreds with new hope in Erin.

"Old Maude" Gonne, once known as "the world's most beautiful woman," and her son. At eighty-two she is casting one of the votes which swept the brilliant young Seán MacBride to power in Eire.

DUBLIN.

It was all like a scene from a Sean O'Casey play. On Easter Monday morning, in downtown Dublin, once again they ran up the Irish green-white-and-orange tricolor over the General Post Office proclaiming *Poblacht na h'Eireann*—the Republic of Ireland. It was thirty-and-three years since the Easter rebels enacted the same scene in the same place, prematurely—but who will say vainly?—and gave their lives to the republican dream. It took three decades and three years to make the Irish Fourth of July official.

Inside the G.P.O. on O'Donnell Street, scene of the quashed 1916 rebellion, a torch burned before the bronze statue of the epic hero Cuchulain, illuminating the plaque to the sixteen executed Easter Week patriots. Any Irish school child can count these names off as if they were beads on a rosary—Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, MacBride. Outside was enacted a scene that neither O'Casey nor any honest dramatist would quite dare perpetrate, even in the Abbey Theater near by. Once again the drama of real life outstripped the playwright's art. Reading the 1949 proclamation was Ireland's new Foreign Minister, Seán MacBride, son of the executed Maj. John MacBride.

The Irish cherish this kind of calculated ironic symbolism, fabricated from the raw stuff of their turbulent history. It would take a flinty-hearted person indeed to begrudge them. Fortunately for Ireland and the western world, the young man with the memory-laden name has zoomed to the top of Irish politics preaching a worthy message: bury the ancient hatred.

A double green mantle fell on Seán MacBride. He is the son not of one Irish revolutionary, but of two. His mother, the tall and beauteous Maude Gonne, was for more than sixty impressioned years the very symbol of the Irish resistance. She was Cathleen ni Houlihan incarnate, the uncrowned Queen of Ireland. Today the grand old lady can sit back and relax. At eighty-two she has lived long enough to be able one day to die in the land of her heart's desire—the Republic of Ireland.

The Gaelic-speaking peasants and fishermen of the southern and western coasts have a fine old legend about the flight of the wild geese. Each spring, when they first hear the melancholy honks of these migratory birds returning from the continent, they assure you it is the souls of the ancient Irish leaders returning from Spain and France, whither down through the centuries they have flown

to rally help for the Irish cause—the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel, the O'Reillys and MacMahons, the Irish Brigade from Fontenoy. In their present Foreign Minister, the Irish at long last have a real live wild goose. For Seán MacBride was born in Paris in 1904, did not come to Ireland until his early teens, and still speaks English with a markedly French accent.

Today, in Ireland, MacBride is generally credited with having toppled the mighty De Valera from power, as a result of which victory he holds down the Ministry for External Affairs in the present interparty government—an office Dev always jealously kept to himself. He was the architect of the recent Republic of Ireland Act. And although he is the youngest and most recent foreign minister in Western Europe, he has already been chosen by his Marshall Plan colleagues to sit on the inner OEEC committee of nine—the steering committee of the European end of ECA.

As the Marshall Plan moves inexorably toward western union, attention turns again toward isolated Ireland, floating alone out here on the edge of the Atlantic. It is time to take a long look at the man who in these coming years will be guiding the foreign policy of this small island whose fields are so green, her bogs so slippery, her politics so volcanic. And whose airfields are so strategically desirable, if the defense of the West is to make sense.

Seán MacBride goes the wild-goose tradition one better. He was, as the Irish would phrase it, "born

in exile." His dad, a County Mayo man who had emigrated to America in his youth, recrossed the Atlantic late in the 1890's to found the Irish Brigade which fought against Britain in the Boer War. It was in the Transvaal that he won the rank of major, and in Paris that he won the hand of Maude Gonne. He used to stride along the Paris boulevards with Boer epaulets on his bright uniform and a British price on his head.

Major MacBride returned unmolested to Dublin in 1905. Quietly, he took a minor job in the Dublin city government. He acquired a reputation as a pleasant man about town with but two passions in life—a hatred of England and a love of good Irish whisky. He was regarded as a fine old soldier who lived very much in the past—so much so that the plotters of the uprising in 1916 never bothered to consult him.

But dawned that Easter Monday morning, and striding along on his way to work in Dublin Castle, Major MacBride ran smack into the thick of things. In St. Stephen's Green he met James Connolly and some of "the boys" hastily digging trenches. When they told him what was afoot, he is reported to have exclaimed, "My God, lads, I never thought you had it in you!" The major grabbed a rifle and joined up. Before the revolt was over, he was in command of Jacob's Factory, one of the last rebel strongholds to capitulate.

Because of the old Boer War rap, Major MacBride was one of the (Continued on Page 171)

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In Dublin, Maude was soon in the thick of things, and again arrested. The British moved her back to London's Holloway Prison for safekeeping. Her last sight of Seán had been as he chased the Black Maria through Dublin. A fortnight later he popped up in London. After making the rounds of the various embassies in a vain attempt to "spring mother," he learned that she had been transferred to a nursing home in the country. Again he studied carefully the movements of the watching detectives, and discovered that there was a one-hour break in the early-morning hours when shifts changed. The next day mother and son were again en route to Dublin.

By the time he was fourteen, if he didn't know what all the issues were, the tall, thin young Irishman certainly knew which side he was on. In 1917, Seán promptly began his own political career by being twice arrested—once career by starting a demonstration at the trial of a Sinn Fein M. P., and once for carrying a pistol butt which he claimed a French soldier had given him as a souvenir. Since he was only fourteen years old, the astounded British military authorities quickly released him, a mistake they were soon to regret.

To attempt to trace the tantalizing skein of modern Irish politics is to wander into a labyrinth whose point of no return should be clearly marked at the entrance. The Irish know their way around in this labyrinth—they live in it. The Easter Rebellion and the subsequent Black-and-Tan War are easy enough to understand in terms of English versus Irish. But if you try to trace events from 1921 onward, Irish versus Irish, then you are in the labyrinth. David Lloyd George ventured into this labyrinth and bumped into Eamon De Valera. Exasperated and bewildered, he finally remarked that trying to fathom De Valera was like trying to pick up quicksilver with a fork. In fairness, Dev's retort should be recorded: "Why didn't he try a spoon?"

The personality and the politics of De Valera so dominated the last three decades in Ireland that no Irishman can tell the story without vehement bias. A clearer picture emerges if we trace the parallel career of a man who began as one of Dev's junior secretaries, fought by his side during the civil-war years, opposed him at the peak of his power, and finally toppled him out of office. That man is Seán MacBride—old enough to have been in the national revolution from the outset, still young enough to want to move beyond it.

From 1917, when he joined the Irish Republican Army as a junior volunteer, to 1937, when he resigned as G-2 of the I.R.A. general staff, Seán MacBride spent most of his days in the political underground, or, as the Irish call it in terms of patriotic reverie, "on the run." This phrase aptly describes those harassed periods between jail sentences and amnesties when many active republicans led double lives—both of them one jump ahead of the authorities.

When the Black-and-Tan War began in earnest—1919-1921—MacBride was already an officer in B Company of the third battalion of the Dublin I.R.A. Brigade. His first big task was to lead a spectacular daylight ambush of British officers proceeding down Pearse Street in a lorry. He moved up quickly and before he was seventeen was promoted to G.H.Q. staff.

That young MacBride had more than a name to conjure with is proved by two other missions then assigned to him. He accompanied De Valera to

Paris as his secretary and translator at the Irish Race Congress, and was sent to London as junior member of the Irish delegation, headed by Arthur Griffiths and Michael Collins, which negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 with Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. This was the ill-starred treaty which ended the war between Britain and Ireland, but touched off the civil war of Irishman versus Irishman.

The treaty had two main features: (1) it created the Irish Free State, with dominion status at home, but under the Crown abroad, and (2) it partitioned the country. Six counties, part of the historic province of Ulster, were left completely within the Empire. The compromise pleased nobody, although it was accepted by most moderates to end The Trouble. It was bitterly opposed by De Valera and I.R.A. as an unacceptable betrayal of republican principles.

Civil war between the new Free State and the I.R.A. promptly broke out. "The Sea-Green Incorruptibles" fought as bitterly against the new pro-treaty government as they ever had against the Union Jack. In a desperate but vain attempt to seize power in Dublin in midsummer, 1922, they were surrounded in the Four Courts—the rambling law buildings along the Liffey—and forced to lay down their arms. De Valera was captured and tossed into Mountjoy Prison. So was Seán MacBride.

In prison, one of MacBride's favorite pastimes was distilling poteen, an Irish pastille that looks mild, but tastes moonshine that looks mild, but tastes like vodka. But his favorite drink to day is the one the American soldiers learned to know so well in Normandy—Calvados. When in Paris last Christmas, MacBride almost missed his plane for Dublin because he was out shopping for some old vintage Calvados for old Maude.

MacBride's aptitude for escaping from prisons was almost equal to his propensity for landing in them. Now comes one of the yarns still told with great zest in Dublin coffeehouses. Seán and some fellow prisoners immediately began plotting escape. First they waited for outside help—it didn't come. Then they started to dig a tunnel—it caved in when a truck rumbled over it. So they went on a hunger strike. After five days, prison authorities decided to move the leading strikers to another jail. They were moved in the middle of the night, clad in pajamas. As the convoy of prison vehicles roared through Dublin, the driver of the truck in which MacBride was riding lost the way. When he got out to ask directions, MacBride and another prisoner prisoner into the cold October night.

In 1923, the civil war ended in a previous amnesty. On the loose and on the run, MacBride moved steadily ahead in underground I.R.A. councils during the remainder of the 1920's. In 1925 he was appointed adjutant general to the then C-in-C., Liam Lynch, and by 1927 he had become G-2. The Irish Government and the I.R.A. continued to play cat and mouse with each other. At times there would be spells of relative calm when known I.R.A. leaders could safely appear in public. At other times—usually following an "incident"—there would be a price on their heads. One of MacBride's outside activities was running a marmalade and jam factory from Roebuck House in Dublin, at the same time that he was directing all I.R.A. recruiting activities. When he took off on the run, old Maude audited the books. After two years the Roebuck Jam Company failed.

Life on the run was always hectic. Disguise was a big problem, and be-

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