The Daily Telegraph. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1883.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3611, 7 February 1883, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1883.

The general character of the news from Ireland is as miserable as it well can be. Nothing bright nor hopeful comes from that country either by mail or cablegram. Political agitation, evictions, _ murders, rapine, arrests, trials, executions, and famine, of such is the burden of the intelligence from Ireland. Of each aud every one of these indications of unrest, lawlessness, barbarity, and failure of crops, we obtain every week a cablegram, and in due course the mails bring the wretched details of crime, misery, and starvation. Occasionally we hear that some one has said in Parliament that the condition of Ireland was improving, the opinion being based on the fact that fewer atrociously cruel and cowardly murders had been reported during the lapse of a whole month. And then, as though to laugh to scorn the idea that the country could exist without the soil being moistened by the blood of the innocent, comes the news of another brutal assassination. So the long record of crime continues, till tho land is Hooded with soldiery, and, no one's liberty being safe, the informer makos his appearance like a foul weed springing from the earth made mud by the gore of murdered men. Arrests, trials, and executions follow quickly ; a sort of reign of terror ensues, during which some amongst the guilty arc brought to justice, and some perhaps who are innocent swing from the gallows. The rail condition of the country, the cause that lies deep down at the bottom of the curse that attaches itself to the island, remains the same. The country can bo pacified by terrorism, and that is the principal cure that is applied to repress the terrorism employed so futilely to remove the cause of the evil. The quietude and peace of tho desert can be obtained by force, and by force Ire-

land is now ruled—hardly governed. For government, in these days, implies the effort to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Mr Gladstone's Administration may profess such auinteution,but,inthefacc of _ Parliament that looks to the vested interests, and to the happiness of the few rather than to that which leads to famine, and to the misery of the many, no effectual effort has ever been made. Ireland is the only country in Europe, it is one of the very few in tho world, where periodical famines destroy the people by starvation. This one fact should present itself to the British Government in such a way and with such force as to compel attention to the necessity of ameliorating the condition of the people. Granted that the Irish are the most difficult people in the world to govern—granted that the Government of the country is beset with difficulties. A\_iat is the cause of the difficulty, and who are they who place the difficulties in the way ': It is just this question that Parliament declines to deal with or to entertain. And it is because Parliament will not go to the root of the evil that the question has been taken up by those least able to consider the vastness of tho interests involved in it. It certainly is not for us to do more than notice the condition of our Irish fellow subjects, but we may be permitted to say that that condition cannot be improved on the one hand by the slaughter of landlords and their agents, or on the other by the wholesale eviction of tenants. The condition of the Irish is something terrible. AYe occasionally read with horror of the finding in London of the body of some poor person who had evidently died of cold and want of food, and wonder is expressed that in such a wonderfully wealthy metropolis how such a thing could occur. When the soul has fled, the body of the dead is found easily enough which in life coidd find no sympathy. And now that people arc dying from starvation in Ireland the ready hand of assistance will be held out again, as it has been before, to do what it can to alleviate distress, but nothing will be done to

prevent distress in the future. AYe liardly think that the Government have done half as much towards averting a famine as has been done towards securing the payment of rents to the landlords. A law of all civilised communities is that those who have shall be protected against those who have nothing. The Irish poor have nothing. In the news brought by the last mail we read that hundreds of evicted families are without shelter and are starving—"begging piteously for a potato or a little corn meal." In whose interests were those "hundreds of families " turned off the land to find food and shelter at the hands of the charitable ? AVhatcvcr may be English feeling with respect to rights of property, we out here, at all events, would scarcely feel harshly disposed towards a few amongst those hundreds who, in the bitterness of their misery, might rail at their hard fate. Is it not from amidst those hundreds that the professional agitator finds his admirers and his followers '{ AVould there be agitation if there were no suffering, no hardship, no starvation 't