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 had, until that point, been looked upon as fools and scaremongers." Looking back over the situation at this critical juncture, it may well be doubted whether it was altogether wise to carry out any sentences into execution, and the Bishop of Limerick referred very pointedly to the example of a very similar situation in the case of the Jameson raid, when the leniency of the Boer Republicans towards the raiders avoided war with England. Technically, of course, the two were exactly parallel--by all the laws of sovereignty a rebel deserves instant death; but it became a question of diplomacy as well--a point which seems to have been lost in the clash of battle. In other words, had time allowed--and of course there was no knowing what effect the resistance of Dublin might have on the country--it may be a moot point whether it might not have been advisable to separate the two questions of the sentence of death and the actual executions, and one can well imagine the conciliatory effect of a Royal Act of Clemency in the event of maturer consideration making it advisable to commute those sentences. Thus Lord Bryce, who might have been considered not only to know Ireland from past experience, but to speak with his hand on the mental pulse of the American people on this matter, strongly advised clemency in the following letter to the _Westminster Gazette_, in which he endorsed the advice of Sir West Ridgeway, a former Under-Secretary for Ireland:--