he murder of
His Majesty's liege subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the
safety of the realm will not be tolerated."

The military authorities have been blamed for the excessive rigour with
which these orders were carried out, especially for the use of shells,
but it may be questioned how far this did not arise purely from the
nature of the situation.

Certainly the rebels were at a disadvantage, and consequently won a
certain amount of sympathy, yet only a day before that sympathy was
entirely with the unfortunate military; but eventually a point was
reached when, instead of the military retrieving the situation lost by
the weakness of the politicians, it became a question whether they were
not undoing a good deal that it had taken a great deal of hard work upon
the part of the politicians to build up.

Now this is no idle theory, but the only possible explanation of a
series of changes that ensued.

When the news of the rising was first announced to John Redmond, he made
a dignified if not too diplomatic reply, in which he expressed despair
about the situation and utter disgust about the culprits.

The next official utterance was the somewhat ponderous manifesto of the
Irish Party--interesting as an historical summary of Ireland's real
attitude to the Empire, but lacking a grip of the actual psychological
drama of the situation.

The same may be said of the Irish leader's first appeal for clemency in
the treatment of the prisoners.

It was in the shape of a question asked of Mr. Asquith as to whether he
was aware that the continuance of military executions in Ireland had
caused rapidly increasing bitterness and exasperation among large
sections of the population who had no sympathy with the rising, and
whether it might not be better to follow the precedent set up by General
Botha in South Africa, where only one had been executed and the rest
exceedingly leniently treated, and stop the executions forthwith.

The Premier's reply was a curt refusal, phrased in the terms of an
absolute confidence in the discretion of the military authorities.

Unfortunately that "discretion" was exercised in such a manner as at
once to place its victims in the same category as Emmet, Wolf Tone, and
the Manchester Martyrs. In a word, to use the words of an English
critic, "It gave the Sinn Feiners the real victory, for it was looked
upon as the verification of all that they had feared and prophesied, and
for which they