FENIANISM.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 12, Issue 933, 11 April 1868, Page 3

FENIANISM.

(From the " Dublin Evening Post.")

Is there positively no escape for Ireland from the consequences of the mania for political burglary that seems to have taken possession of a number — we really know not whether of Irishmen or strangers to Ireland ? Can Ireland do nothing to extricate the national responsibility from the ignominy of these meaningless outrages, for which it is every day being made accountable before England and Europe and America? There is not a single name, the representative of anysort of worth, substance, or intellect — nay, credentials of any one alive — that can be brought forward to admit the authorship of imbecilities that are being set down to a nation. Fenianism was not a very brilliant thing in its conception ; bub we are persuaded that the head organiser would feel hurt, and deservedly hurt, by the suspicion of having organised the silly violences that have marked the course of the movement — if, indeed, they form apart of it — since his deposition ; nnd that he congratulates himself upon a turn of fortune, which has placed his own credit, at all events, beyond the shafts of the calumny that would associate him with the enterprises of last week. The ridiculous antics in this country and in England, of which there is only too much likelihood that Ireland will have to pay the penal ty in her dearest interests, have drawn upon the nation the scorn even of the American press ; and we stand at this moment, without one name that any man has ever heard, between Ireland and the contempt of the world. Ireland does not mean revolution certainly. When she meant it, she knew how to go about it, and had no reason to be ashamed of her effort or of her failure. There was courage, there was genius, there was universality, there was heroism, there were battle-rields, in the uprising of 1798; but we now find the national honour compromised more deeply even than the national interest, by people whom nobody can lay ej-es upon, except two gunners in a toy tower, a shopkeeper's nephew, and a shopkeeper's assistant in a Cork gun shop ; while, instead of the names of a Fitzgerald or an Euunett, to give consecration to a national disaster, we have nothing but the shipwreck of the national character, verified, it may he, by the signature of " Captain Mud," Doubtless, we are conscious in Ireland that we have no right to be disgraced. Wo understand very woll that the average Irishman is not so stupid as to believe in the subversion of a powerful empire by methods that would not occur to any one in the possession of las reason ; but we must do something to vindicate ourselves before the world from the reproach which otherwise will settle on us of being equally uuable to endure or to resist. If the sense of national dignity be as strong as it ought to bo, it will find some way in which to repudiate and discountenance occurrences not less dishonourable to the national understanding than to the national pride — some way in which to make it plain to the world that the most fixed and earnest purpose to right ourselves has not blinded us to the realities of a situation which none in the world better realize than the Irish people.