Foul Murder

A lean, rather handsome young Irishman, his face prematurely stern and sad, set out last week from his home at Black Rock, near Dublin, to attend mid-day mass. He walked alone and swiftly, scuffing up tiny clouds of earth from the road. His wife or his baby daughter may have been in his mind; or perhaps young Kevin O'Higgins was pondering some one of his problems as Minister of Justice of the Irish Free State. At 34, he had climbed higher than most politicians are content to find themselves at 64. The noon sun poured down, hot and germinal. A motor car, approaching at great speed, droned louder.

Brakes set with a long screech. Three men pointed black steel muzzles from their car at the lone pedestrian. Four bullets passed through Mr. O'Higgins' neck, one lodged in his chest, a sixth entered one ear and penetrated to the base of his brain. The motor car lurched, raced away.

Almost miraculously Mr. O'Higgins survived for some hours. "Forgive them all!" were his first, gasping words to those who came running at the crack of rifles. "I forgive them," he repeated, "I am dying at peace with my enemies. . . . Someone bring paper. I must make my will. ..."

Beside him knelt Professor John MacNeil, an old friend, onetime Minister of Education. His pencil took down nine words: "I leave everything to my wife and baby daughter." Although Mr. O'Higgins' strength was ebbing he was able to sign.

At the last he said: "There is no hope .... They've got me just as they got my father .... I die for my country. I go. . . ."

Kevin O'Higgins was one of those who formed the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State in 1921. "We were simply eight young men," he has said, "standing amid the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of an-other not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the key-hole."

This statement did not exaggerate, and the task of taming Ireland's "wild men" fell to 28-year-old Kevin O'Higgins. At one time the new Free State had to employ an army of 40,000 men to put down that violence which had become second nature to Irishmen. Firmness was needed and Mr. O'Higgins proved himself capable of making bold, salutary decisions with the quickness of a steel trap. His enemies became innumerable. His success in quieting Ireland and restoring the police power earned him a title: "Ireland's Strongest Man."

By family connection Kevin O'Higgins stood rooted in the very fibre of the new State. His father, Dr. Thomas O'Higgins, a distinguished surgeon, was a man who simultaneously championed the highest nationalist aspirations of Irishmen and defied their tendency to base, rabble violence. The result was that a band of armed incendiaries murdered him in his own home on the night of Feb. 11, 1923.

The Governor-General of Ireland, Timothy Michael Healy, was an uncle of Kevin O'Higgins. Blood and bone, Mr. O'Higgins stood for all that gives a man the right to say: "I die for my country."