The Daily Telegrams. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1891.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 6070, 10 February 1891, Page 2

The Daily Telegrams. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1891.

It must have been noticed in our cablegrams, in reference to the interminable Home Rule question, the nervous anxiety of the Nationalist party to secure the control of the police. Out in this colony, where we are not behind the scenes, it was quite impossible to discover why Parnell, and all the other Separatists, made it a sine qua non that in the granting of Home Rule the Irish Parliament, through its Executive, should have the policeand the militia under its authority. The English papers to hand by last mail explain the reason. And it is a very simple one. It is because from several points of view the control of the constabulary is vital to the success of the Irish revolution The constabulary would be the nucleus of an army, and under a short-service system the whole effective male population could be passed through its ranks. Should England become embroiled in foreign difficulties, and bs compelled to withdraw her garrisons from Ireland, we should see then what use the Irish Government would make of the native army. But, perhaps, it is more with a view to the confiscation of land that the Home Rulers want the control of the constabulary. Mr S. H. Butcher, writing to the Times, points out that the conflict about the land is now being fought out on certain selected estutes in Ireland. The Campaigners have joined the conspiracy and held to it on the strength of the pledge aud promise given by the Irish leaders that when Home Rule 1 comes they will be reinstated. Meanwhile, in many instances, other tenants have been planted on their farms. They are in legal possession. Several of them have bought their holdings To dispossess them by direct legislation would be an ugly beginning for a Home Rulo Parliament and might raise questions between Dublin and Westminister. But direct legislation is not necessary. It is a clumsy and impolitic wav of doing the business. If the constabulary are under an Irish Executivo the legislative power may be dispensed with. That Executive could and would refuse police protection for person and property to the farmers who hold these lands. They would suffer them to be moonlighted, to be strictly boycotted and rigidly shunned, and would take good care that tho boycotters should never be "shadowed." Some sturdy northern farmers might for a time inanago to sell their cattle somehow and dofend their homes and families against attacks. But with all the forces of Government arrayed against them they could not hold out long. They would be starved or terrified into submission. The land question on this side would have soon received its settlement and the property of the recalcitrant tenant be confiscated. Hut not only the tenants on the Campaign estates, but the owners of land all oyer Ireland could be silently robbed without a single direct act of legislation! Let the tenants strike against payment of rent. Let the landlord take legal proceedings. Who is to protect the sheriff's officers in executing writs? Hitherto the constabulary have done so. It has been one of the standing grievances of the Nationalists that tho officers of the law have been so protected. An Irish Executive has oiuy to refuse police protection' jn enforcing the payment of rent to render that payment a thing of the past. If all thjt the Nationalist leaders have said and done for the last ten years has any meaniug, they cannot, if ever they are in power, employ ths police to carry cut evictions. In England and Scotland people are apt to think of the control of the police as an affair of county or parochial polities. No Irishman, Unionist, or Nation- ,: ° f " who knows anything about his own an..-, ,-u,id to the great and Imperial country is 0.~ involves. Control issues which the matter ._ _ . oi the constabulary carries with it evsry other question—the power of rebellion, the certainty of separation, the .confiscation p; the property of landowners, the expulsion from their homes of those tenants who have j defied orders and taken farms in spite of the Plan of Campaign.