June 23. a period of prevailing despondency, the result of the elections in South Ireland is the best news that the British Empire has received for many long day. A month ago the wing of the Dail Eireann which had signed the Free State Treaty with Great Britain and had since been trying hopelessly to carry on some kind of government found itself compelled to agree to a coalition with De Valera and the Republicans. The latter accepted this arrangement, we may assume, in the confident expectation that they would be able to control or rather coerce the elections, which it was simultaneously agreed to hold in June, by the terrorist methods which they have actually employed, kidnapping of pro-Treaty candidates, violent abstraction of ballot papers and the like. We may suppose that it was the fear of such terrorism as well as the preponderating Republican interest which would inevitably be found in the coalition, which caused the British Government to demur so strongly to the new combination and led to the subsequent conferences in Ton-don; and inasmuch as we have never been told on what lines those conferences ran, but only, at the end, were informed that the outcome was quite satisfactory, we must once again imagine that Mr. Arthur Griffith was able to convince the British Government that the elections would not impossibly go very differently to what De Valera fondly hoped. Such at any rate is the fact. The strength of the Pro-Treaty party throughout South Ireland is overwhelming. Even in Dublin where the Republicans counted on an easy victory, under the menace of the very storm centre of their terrorist organization, they only succeeded in winning one out of eleven seats and at the moment of writing fifty-one Pro-Treaty Coalitionists have been elected against thirty-one Republicans, the remaining seats going to Labourites, Independents and Farmers, who, whatever way they vote in Parliament will hardly vote for the Republicans.
Mr. De Valera is quoted in to-day's telegrams as saying that ''Treland under a threat of war yoted as England desired but that
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.