302	'	ENGLISHSAGA        *
the great Peace that succeeded the war to end war were disconcert-
ingly unrestful. Anger and strife were not confined to the
factory and soapbox. Ireland, India and Egypt were all in more
or less open rebellion. At Amritsar General Dyer gave the order
to fire on an Indian Nationalist crowd: in a few minutes 400 were
killed and nearly 1000 wounded. Some said that the general had
averted a second Mutiny, others that he had disgraced his uniform
and behaved like a Prussian. In Ireland British officers were
dragged from their beds by masked assassins and butchered in
front of their wives, 'an imprisoned Lord Mayor starved himself
to death to shame the Saxon despot, and Sinn Fein gunmen
maintained a rival and forbidden administration with their own
parliament, army, police and courts of justice defying those of the
imperial government with whom they waged ceaseless, secret,
and bloody war. The campaign was even carried into England,
where a Field-Marshal of Orange views was shot by Sinn Feiners
on the steps of his house in Eaton Place.
But when the Coalition government responded in kind to
lawlessness by abandoning law and recruiting a force of dare-
devil, ex-service misfits—nicknamed "black and tans"—to "raise
hell" in Irish villages, the tired English dream for a moment
reasserted itself. The English did not like the Irish, who, as
^represented by the newspapers and their own actions, were a
manifest nuisance, but they had a sense of justice and an invinc-
ible love of decent and legalised dealing. "Authorised reprisals"
against innocent householders and women and children were too
much for.them. Public opinion, for once rendered articulate by
unanimity, made itself felt, and the government, with an election
before it in the not distant future, changed its policy. In the
latter part of 1921, assisted by a timely speech from the King, the
more imaginative members of the Coalition made contact with
the less 'intransigent^1 of the Irish leaders. In the strained negotia-
tions that preceded the Treaty which gave Dominion Status to
Ireland, one great Englishman, Lord Birkenhead, long lost in the
post-war moral'confusion and welter, took his solitary chance to
prove his own wasted genius for statesmanship and the enduring
tolerance, common sense and humanity of British policy.
After i92Uiimperial_> like foreign problems, faded into the
background. In that year the full force of the economic anarchy
which scourged the post-war world struck commercial Britain.
The orders for urgent reconstruction after the devastation of the