Death of Countess

"Mr. David Lloyd George is the most despicable man in the world."

--Maxim of the COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ

When Constance Georgine, Countess of Markievicz, died in Dublin last week, there were some few persons who experienced relief but many who were sad.

Her father, the late Sir Jocelyn Gore-Booth, first had good reason to know his daughter's metal in 1900. She, aged at that time 32, roused his Irish tenants to rebel against him, and made use of the the clutches of his guardianship and flee to Paris.

There she met a Polish artist, Count Markievicz. He was attracted perhaps by her pale, fragile beauty, perhaps by the twinkling fire in her blue eyes. They married--Irishwoman and Pole--uniting in a miniature alliance the characteristics of their irrepressible, astounding peoples.

In 1916 one of the guards of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin resisted the entrance of a mob led by the Countess Markievicz. She opened her purse, drew out a pistol, shot the guard dead, and continued to lead a faction of the great Republican demonstration staged in Dublin throughout the notorious "Black Easter Week."

A murderess, the Countess was sentenced to life imprisonment. One year later she was released, and in the succeeding year (1918) she was elected a member of the British Parliament. At that time she launched and tirelessly repeated her maxim concerning Mr. Lloyd George (see above), whom she blamed for his opposition to the project of creating Ireland a Republic.

After the establishment of the Irish Free State (1922), Countess Markievicz took up another maxim: "The Irish Free State is not Irish, is not Free, and is not a State." Small ingenuity is needed to support this very logical thesis, and the Countess gave to it all her great energies, demanding that a true "Irish Republic" be established, "instead of our present mongrel specimen of a 'Dominion.'"

She died last week, following an operation for appendicitis from which complications developed.