for Roger Casement, who was in his eyes simply one who tried to seduce Irish troops by threats and bribes into treason to their salt, one who made himself among the worst instruments of Germany.  At the re-assembly of Parliament on April 27th he expressed the “feeling of detestation and horror” with which he and his colleagues had regarded the events in Dublin; a feeling which he believed to be shared “by the overwhelming mass of the people of Ireland.”  On May 3rd, in a statement to the Press, he denounced fiercely “this wicked move” of men who “have tried to make Ireland the cat’s-paw of Germany.”  “Germany plotted it, Germany organized it, Germany paid for it.”  The men who were Germany’s agents “remained in the safe remoteness of American cities,” while “misguided and insane young men in Ireland had risked, and some of them had lost, their lives in an insane anti-patriotic movement.”  It was anti-patriotic, he urged, because Ireland held to the choice she had made, to the opinion which thousands of Irish soldiers had sealed with their blood.  It was “not half so much treason to the cause of the Allies as treason to the cause of Home Rule.”

On the day when that statement appeared the sequel had begun to unroll itself.  In the House of Commons Mr. Asquith announced the trial, sentence and shooting of three signatories to the Republican proclamation—­Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh.  With the exception of James Connolly, these were the men most directly answerable for launching an attempt which had cost five hundred lives and destroyed over two millions’ worth of property, Redmond accepted their doom as just.

“This outbreak happily seems to be over.  It has been dealt with with firmness, which was not only right, but it was the duty of the Government so to deal with it.”

But now that example had been made, he held that other thoughts should guide those in authority.

“As the rebellion, or the outbreak, call it what you like, has been put down with firmness, I do beg the Government, and I speak from the very bottom of my heart and with all my earnestness, not to show undue hardship or severity to the great masses of those who are implicated, on whose shoulders there lies a guilt far different from that which lies upon the instigators and promoters of the outbreak.  Let them, in the name of God, not add this to the wretched, miserable memories of the Irish people, to be stored up perhaps for generations, but let them deal with it in such a spirit of leniency as was recently exhibited in South Africa by General Botha, and in that way pave the way to the possibility ... that out of the ashes of this miserable tragedy there may spring up something which will redound to the future happiness of Ireland and the future complete and absolute unity of this Empire.  I beg of the Government, having put down this outbreak with firmness, to take only such action as will leave the least rankling bitterness in the minds of the Irish people, both in Ireland and elsewhere throughout the world.”