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Little doubt now exists that the Sinn Féiners were partly financed by hyphenated Americans of Irish and German descent and it is believed that the Von Igel papers if published will disclose proof of a remarkable series of plots and conspiracies, not only against Ireland, but against all our colonial possessions. The papers, it will be remembered were discovered by Government detectives when the New York office of Captain Von Papen, the disgraced German Military Attache was raided and Von Igel,Von Papen’s secretary was arrested. The raid on Von Papen’s office was one of the sequels to the disclosures which the German spy, Von Der Goltz made when he was arrested in England. The German Ambassador at Washington at first made strong demands that Von Igel’s papers were official; that they were, therefore, precluded from seizure, and must be handed over to him without examination. Now he has changed front, by admitting that they are not official, to escape from the difficulty of having to identify them as such, and thus implicating the German Embassy in the conspiracies against the United States which they disclose. The ground he now takes up is that the papers are personal belongings of an Embassy Attache and as such are immune from seizure. The Department of Justice, it is said, will hold that documents relating to plots against the security of the State are not immune from seizure and the security of the State is certainly involved in plots to foment rebellion in Ireland.

Now, are we to suppose that our own Government was ignorant of the close connection thus revealed between the enemy and the Sinn Féin propaganda in Ireland? That is preposterous. It is precluded by the fact that it was upon the confessions of Von Der Goltz that Von Igel was arrested at Von Papon’s private office in New York and the incriminating papers seized. John Devoy the editor of the "Gaelic American" the organ of the American Sinn Féiners, is threatening to accuse the President of the responsibility for the sinking of Sir Roger Casement’s ammunition ship, on account of the warnings given by a member of the Administration to the British Government. He charges that this is the "most disgraceful and dishonourable act ever committed by an American President – a deliberate violation of neutrality". The obtuseness of the Irish rebel and German Americans to the violation of American neutrality by themselves and by German Embassy officials is marvellous. Devoy’s furious tirade simply proves the close connection between the German official and pro-German plotters in America and the Sinn Féiners in Ireland. The "Times" correspondent aptly remarks that Americans are becoming accustomed to the German trick of accusing their enemies of their own crimes. What is to be said of the Irish Administration’s policy of doing nothing while all this ramification of plotting from Berlin to New York and from New York to Dublin was going on? Now that the back of the rebellion has been broken, and the Irish metropolis is again a quite safe place for peaceable loyal subjects of the King, the more that is disclosed of the genesis of the rising the more flagrant becomes the folly and ineptitude of the Irish Administration in allowing the plot to come to a head.