Current Topies.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 411, 25 February 1881, Page 1

Current Topics.

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

As we might have expected, in tbe present struggle, the hereditary and monstrous enemies of the Irish race, tie " anti-Irish Irishmen" who have always taken so large a part in oppressing and belying their fellow-countrymen, have not been backward, but in all things true to the traditions of their class. The other day, for example, we saw Lord Plunket lending his influence in the house of Lords to throw out a measure intended to benefit the people in question, and now we find his brother, the Hon. David Plunket* with a similar purpose, addressing a meeting of Conservative working-men at Chesterfield. Mr. Plunket , it would seem, had been lately spending some time at the residence of Lord Ardilaun, at the head of Lough Corrib, a place in the immediate neighbourhood of these bleak hills above Lough Mask where, some twenty years ago, the evictions of Partry took place — carried out by the orders of the then Bishop of Tuam, Mr. Plunket's uncle, and under the inspection of that Right Reverend nobleman's honourable daughters, who, well cloaked and booted against the harshness of the weather, stood by without a tremor, while a whole village full of people, the aged, the eick, the infant, all together, were ruthlessly flung out beneath the wintry sky. And within a day's drive, moreover, lie the Balla estates of Mr Plunket's cousin. Sir Robert Blosse Lynch, on whose lands the last few months have witnessed some of the most heartless evictions of the times. Mr Plunket, then, claims to know something of the neighbourhood referred to, and there is no doubt but that, in return, the neighbourhood has a good right to own an acquaintanceship, at least, with this honourable gentleman's kith and kin — their fame, as it may be seen, has cv e n " gone out to the ends of the earth,"' and we have every reason to believe it still abides intact at home. But to come to Mr. Planket's speech : amongst other things, he spoke as follows : — I have spent the greater part of the last three months in a house which is situate on the borders of the counties of Mayo and Galway, and belongs to one of the most popular landowners in that province, and when I say that Lord Mountmorres met his terrible fate within two miles of that house, that I myself saw the blood of the murdered man while it still curdled in a pool upon the high road ; when 1 tell you that the now famous farm of Captain Boycott lies but a couple of miles in another direction, and that I have had frequent interviews with Captain Boycott, both befoTe and after the Protestant boys came gallantly to his assistance, you will admit that I must know something of the very centre of disturbance." A man, may, nevertheless, have been in the very centre of disturbance without having learned in the slightest degree to appreciate the cause of the disturbance. When a man who. like Mr. Plunket, belongs to a family noted for an almost insane pride, and which has been the very creature cf the existing evil condition of Ireland, sits in judgment upon it. it would almost take a miracle to open his eyes. Nothing of this kind, however, has been wrought in the present instance, and Mr. Plunket remains blinded by his self-importance and the interests of the parasitical class to which he so especially belongs. Meantime let us mark his sensational allusion to the "blood of Lord Mountmorres — » by no means proved to have been shed in the agrarian cause, but if anything rnther the contrary — and let us rote, again, his adroit appeal to the " no-popery" sentiment in his reference to the Orangemen, or as lie calls them, Captain Boycott's " Protestant boys," — whose " gallantry" nevertheless, the Captain seems so little to have recognised ; for, Eaid he to Mr. Gladstone, twelve labourers whom he might have himself obtained would have been sufficient for his purposes, and it was none r.* 1 is needs that brought a whole army marching into Mayo. The I i otestant boys"' made fools of themselves, and so their ungiateful client has given them to understand. Mr. Plunket, then, goes on to say that all the honors reported from the district have been true, and he adds, "As an Jiishmau, I make that admission with shame nnd sorrow." It is, rather, the shame and sorrow of Ireland that such men as (his may call themselves Irishmen. They are, like the young of the pelican, a monstrous brood that, as it were, live and thrive upon

THE HON. DAVID PLUNKET.

the life-blood of their father-land. They bear to their fellow-country-men the same relationship that the promoted negro slave, who was ready at the bidding of his master to whip a fellow-slave to death, bore to his brethren in bondage. They are the shame of Ireland, and the product of her centuries of servitude ; men without a country, the creatures of tyranny, and incarnations of selfishness, in all its most exaggerated forms. Their word is worse than worthless. But Mr» Plunket complains that the people he speaks of have been spoiled ; if left to themselves, he says, they would have continued well-mannered and submissive. They still would have raised their bats to " his honour," and borne with patience such treatment as we have already described, inflicted on them by the order and under the un pitying eyes of Mr. Plunkefc's own nearest and most tender relatives. They would have continued to bear, almost without a murmur, the being cast with all their sick, their old, and young, out upon the road whenever it suited the convenience of their landlords. Mr. Plunket, however, is apologetic on. behalf of these people. " I have lived among them," he says " before the Land League was invented, before they were possessed by that agitation as men were formerly possessed by devils. I have seen them good-humoured and light hearted, patient under conditions of life that were often hard and difficult enough ; I have known them faithful to their employers, kindly with their landlords, honest to their engagements, and grateful for kindness. Such were their characters and such their habits before the Land Leaguers came among them ; and if you now see in them the opposites of all those virtues, I beg you to consider with what manner 01 influences they have been plied." It would, nevertheless, be necessary, rather to apologise for a people so intensely servile, so grovelling, and altogether spiritless, as to continue content with slavery and misery when once the word of hope that deliverance was possible had been spoken amongst them. Mr. Plunket, who is not ignorant, even though he be a bigot and a sycophant, must know that the Irish people have never been content, that the nrinliness has never been wholly crushed out of them, and that <at any time it has only required some one to raise his voice in their defence in order to secure their hearty support and adherence. Had he the heart of a man, and not that of the lowest of all creatures upon earth, the one that to fill its own belly is ready to outrage all the common rights and feelings of humanity, he would side with bis fellow-conntrymen in their straggle, and seek for a true importance by joining in their battle rather than by the restitution of the " hat worship"' that seems to have been so dear to his soul, and so necessary to remind him of the patent of cheap nobility, that has glorified his otherwise by no means noble house.

GREED AND AMBITION.

Among the other accusations brought by the Hon. David Plunket against the Land League, he saya they •' called up greed and ambition " in the peasantry. Let us see, then, in what this " greed and ambition" consist. Let us see what it is the peasantry desire to gain, or rather, what it is that they seek to be delivered from, for we fancy that, for the present at least, their " greed and ambition," for the most part, take this negative character. A stranger, then, in Ireland, in the reign of Elizabeth could describe tha condition of the people as reduced beneath that of the very beasts of the field. Today, a stranger there can still tell us that, not in all the world — not in India nor China, not in Anatolia nor Bulgaria, is anything to be found that equals the misery of the peasantry in question. The state of the Irish, he says, " is worsn than that of any people in. the world, let alone Europe." And again, he tells the English public, to whom he writes through the columns of the Times: — "These people are made as we are — patient beyond belief, loyal, but, at the same time, broken spirited and desperate ; living on the verge of starvation in places in which we would not keep our cattle." II is that distinguished officer, Colonel Gordon, whose fame in connection with his services in China and Egypt is world-wide, who has spoken thu3, and all honour to him for it. But other visitors to Ireland bad already told us the same thing. Mr. James Eedpath, for example, ia a gentleman also of Scottish origin, and we have all seen the pictures he has drawn for us. Nor, were those pictures exaggerated, we have seen nothing described by him the equal at least of which we have not looked upon with our own eyes. It is now more than thirty years since the worst days of the great famine passed away, bat tho?©

who witnessed its horrors can never forget them so long as they retain the faculty of memory. The country was thickly inhabited when the scourge began ; when it ended— so far as it did end — the country was desolate, and we saw its habitations melt away before our faces. We saw the sick, the dying — nay, the very dead lie on the road-side, where some pitiless hand had cast them out in their extremity. The corpses were buried so thick and hurriedly that we have known of instances in which the dogs came at night anjl tore them from their graves ; and we have heard of worse things than this, but we shall speak only of what fell under our personal observation. It is a harrowing memory still, that of the all but naked children, mere living skeletons, weird and ghastly, who dragged themselves about to beg for food. One or two of those who survived, and whom we saw in after years, when they ought to have been men, were still, to all appearance, strange, withered-looking children ; they had never grown up. It was a pitiful sight to see women swollen with what must hare been some kind of dropsy, and which was invariably fatal, still toiling to crawl about, and try to find something for their families to eat. There was fever everywhere ; in sheds hastily fitted up for hospitals ; in the houses that remained standing ; in the ditches where the outcasts had leaned a few sticka against the bank or wall, and covered them over with aa armful of straw, or with Bods, to form a shelter At night the air was filled with the sound of horns or cries, made by people who stayed in the fields to prevent the famishing creatures from coming and carrying away the turnips or sheep. On an estate of one of our principal gentry two poor women were taken at this time, who, like the prodigal longing to fill himself with the husks that fed the swine, had stolen a handful or two from some of the Clops, to keep themselves and their childen from fainting of hunger. They were brought into the stable yard of the mansion in question, aad there the eldest eon of the house and his relative, a nobleman, had them tarred and feathered — and these were landlords of the higher rank. But let no one suppose the misery ended with what was called the Famine. Long after the Famine was over, we have seen women cutting nettles in the ditches to make a dinner for their families. We have seen a household that passed for being better off than its neighbours sit down at mid-day to dine off Swedish turnips thinly sprinkled with oaten meal, and which were considered rich because a little dripping had been mixed with the water in which they swam. We have heard it said that Irishmen at home are lazy men at work, but it ought rather to be acknowledged that they deserve credit for being able to stand up at all and work on fare iriuch, although better than this we speak of, is still insufficient properly to support the human frame. Since the Famine we have known men. and men with wives and children, work for sixpence a day ; eightpence a day we have known to be considered a reasonable rate of wages. In a word, since the Famine, we have habitually seen what elsewhere would have been regarded as famine, and we know that such a state of things still largely prevails throughout the country in question. Is it, then, only "greed and ambition" that can desire a deliverance from it, or is it to be expected, or even ■wished, that the people should continue to Bubmit to it with lightheartedness and good humour ? Could their light hearts and good humour under such circumstances be indeed natural or genuine ? But let us come to the landlords. We have already narrated one of the deeds performed by them, and we can tell more. It was since the Famine that we saw a range of cabins built upon a waste in a certain district of Connaught. They were ordinary Connaught cabins of the poorer kind, the wails built of stones without any mortar, and the roofs thatched with heath. All around them the land was covered with rock, stones, and barren heather, and the people who were to inhabit them were about to he removed there from a portion of the same estate, where they and their fathers had lived for generations, and whose fertility, conferred by their labours had excited the greed of their landlord, and decided him on taking it into his own hands, and removing them to till the wild, and make it fit for cultivation. It was since the Famine that we saw a landowner turn the people out from a whole village on whose site he had chosen to build a residence. Those considered fit to work were driven off to America, or wherever they chose to go. Those acknowledged to be totally unfit — old women, grandmothers who had well earned rest for their declining years, were lodged together in a shed and obliged to spin for the bit they put in their mouths. And this sending off of the people out of the country : it has been much praised and hit upon as the expedient for the prosperous settlement of Ireland. A few years ago, nevertheless, all England was thrilling with sentiment over the separation of families among the Negro slaves of the Southern States. This formed the most moving subject in Mrs Stowe's great work, " Uncle Tom's Cabin," and it could have been only something deeply and universally rooted in human nature that awoke a sympathy so keen aud general. This separation was looked upon, and just'y looked upon, as one of the worst things in the accursed system alluded to— now happily extinct even at the cost of so great a war. Is the Irish peasant less worthy of regard than the Negro slave 1 Or can any human being be justly required to give up

all human rights and feelings — home aud country, mother, father husband, wife and child 1 For this is what emigration has meant and still means in many instances. " Domestic love," said Thomas Davi^ writing of the Irishman more than thirty years ago, " almost morbid from external suffering, prevents him from becoming a fanatic or a misanthrope, and reconciles him to life." The emigration movement had not then as yet begun, and Davis did not know how the rending of that great love was about to become another feature in the lives of those to whose cause he had so passionately devoted himself. But this is a digression ; to return. It was since the Famine that we knew of a landlord who forced the victim of his seduction upon his tenant for a wife, in order that the scandal might be hidden. We heard the story told of a man with whom we were acquainted, by another of the same class, and who recounted it as an extremely clever device, and as a most excellent joke. Was it a praise- worthy patience that endured this 1 It was since the Famine that the Protestant clergyman of a certain parish pointed out to us, with every expression of horror and disgust, a landlord of his district whose brutality had inflicted on the daughter of one of his tenants the most grievous wrong that maa can inflict on woman ; and the girl had been of singular attractions, of perfect innocence, and almost a child. He had, indeed, been brought to trial for his crime, but was acquitted, in the face of overwhelming evidence, by a jury packed with his fellow-landowners and their dependents ; and we saw him afterwards in a public place among a group of the chief gentlemen of his county, by whom le continued to be regarded as a capital good fellow. Is it then " greed and ambition " that seek to be delivered not only from the danger of a recurrence of the graver ills we have described, but from sufferings that are only light in comparison with them ? Is it " greed and ambition " alone that seek freedom from the despotic yoke of such men as those we speak of ? "We fancy there are none who will make such a claim, unless, like the Hon. David Plunket, they belong to a class that has grown fat on human misery, and whose minds are foul with the constant pursuit of self-interest, and every indulgence of the petty tyrant.

IS IT TBUE THEN?

Can the writer of a " Passing Note " in last week's Witness find nothing more powerful to advance against Mr. Arthur Sketchley's account of this colony than the "No Popery " cry 1 If so, we fear New Zealand must beg to be saved from her friends, for they show her cause to be weak. The wiiter in question informs his readers of what most of them who have any acquaintance whatever with the current literature of the day must already have known, that is that " Arthur Sketchley " is the norn deplume of a gentleman named Rose, who had at one time been a clergyman in the Church of England. A " renegade clergyman " this writer calls him, with au evident attempt to excite for New Zealand the sympathy of the public, as if they might thus be blinded to her faults, and she not cleared of the charges brought against her. The writings of " renegade " clergymen have, however, been too well established in the highest ranks of the cultured world to become discredited by any insult that men of small minds and ill-manners may offer to their authors. Cardinal Newman, for example, is also a " renegade clergyman " whose books are universally regarded as an honour to the English language, and the English Press teams with the writings of " renegades " generally. There is, perhaps, hardly a newspaper of note in London upon whose staff some " renegade " has not a chief place. What, therefore, the nick-name that the writer of a " Passing Note " has, with much vulgarity, conferred upon Mr. Rose, may be expected to effect among the world outside of New Zealand, whom, nevertheless, we conclude, it is most important to convince that Mr. Rose has been in error, it is difficult to understaud. In New Zealand itself, again, we should have thought it was not necessary to have increased the indignation excited by Mr. Rose's sketch, through the invocation of the "No Popery " cry. If that sketch be uutrue there will be a full amount of indignation here against its misrepresentations, and nothing wil 1 be needed to fill up the measure of this indignation ; if it be true there will still be the extreme fury of a degraded people stripped of their disguise and made known to the world in all their ugliness. And this writer of a " Passing Note " has done nothing to prove that it is not true ; his attack upon the author of the statements in question, on the contrary, is just of such a nature as to lead impartial people to conclude that there was nothing he could do to vindicate the colony's fair fame, but that he had been obliged in desperation to adopt the warfare of the scold, and take to calling nick-names and attributing unworthy motives. Again, it seems a strange assurance for any writer who is a member ot the Onurch of England to stigmatise as a 11 renegade " even any clergyman who has left that communion. He must know that he himself belongs to some one or other of a collection of wrangling sects whose bond of union is a mere matter of temporal convenience. He must know that, no matter what party he belongs to, under the same roof with him there are as many who will tell him he is going straight to perdition, as there are who will agree with him that he is in the right path, although some be there who

will declare that there is no such thing as perdition at all. He must know that all around him there is strife and confusion, and that variance and disputing are the order of the day ; why, then, when there are so many parties opposed to one another, should he condemn those who having failed to reconcile the warring elements have struck out a new path for themselves, or gone in upon an old one struck out for them long since ? To do so is unreasonable, and inconsistent. Meantime, it might, perchance, prove on close examination, could such be made, that the " renegade " clergyman who had given up his source of livelihood, and, to a great degree, his friends, in answer to the call of conscience, was the honest and trustworthy man, while the apparently steadfast clergyman, breaking down the faith he professed to teach, obedient to a law he regarded as sacxilegious, or obliged to use a system, and accept all its contents upon oath without any mental reservation, whose use, nevertheless, he looked upon as little less than sinful, and whose contents as rejected in his heart or explained away, was the real apostate from the truth. At any rate now, when all the non-Catholic world are changing their beliefs, and hardly any man of mature years, even though he be an Anglican clergyman t continues in the creed taught him in his youth, it is an absurdity to stigmatise any particular class of men who have changed their opinions as " renegade," and we should expect to find such an epithet only, where, perhaps, we have in fact found it, that is in the " slums of literature." In conclusion, -we recommend the " Passing Note " writer to enter upon some other defence of his colony. No answer has as yet been made by him to Mr. Rose's assertions that will carry the slightest weight with it. Oa the contrary, we say again, he haa but added to the gravity of the accusations in question by putting forward a suspicion of their truth in the necessity he has seen for enlisting the " No Popery" cry in their discredit.

WHAT A PROPOSAL I

In Colonel Gordon's letter, published by the Times , the following passage also occurs :—": — " lam not well off, but I would offer or his agent £1000 if either of them would live one week in one of these poor devils' places, and feed as these people do." The people are the Irish peasantry and the gentleman whose name is not given is evidently an Irish landlord. Bat Colonel Gordon does not know what he is doing j he insinuates tlat the landlord belongs to the same order of beings as that to which the peasant belongs, and that is a most absurd insinuation. The Irish landlord, even the meanest squireen of them all, and who owns but an acre of land, is a " gentleman " above all things ; and people who are not " gentlemen " cannot in the least understand what that term means. Noblesse oblige, they used to say in old times, but that originally meant, we believe, that the nobleman was obliged to observe a line of conduct in everything distinguished for its nobility. To be a "gentleman" in Ireland meant nothing of the kind ; it imposed no high duties upon any man, but it gave him a right to look down on every humble calling! to despise all kinds of handicraft, to shun contact with the tradesman or the shopkeeper as if he mast communicate some unsavoury effluvium to any one holding close intercourse with him. Indeed, we believe that if ninety-nine out of every hundred of our worthy fellowcolonists who now, as we perceive by the tone of some of our contemporaries, sympathise so much with the Irish landlords in their difficulties, were transported across the ocean and set down in the middle of the class they so much commiserate they would be very much chagrined with the treatment they would receive. The landlords would not take them up with a pair of tongs, as the saying is. All because they were selfmade men and of business associations they would be snubbed in a Wiiy that would enable them to realise that the poor tiller of the earth had a hard time of it among so haughty a race. And so he has, he is not regarded as thoroughly human, or treated as if he were such ; he is made to be kicked and kicked again, aud all the time to fawn upon the foot that kicks him. That is the meaning of all these complaints we hear of the spoiled manners of the people, of their loss of lightheartednesa and good humour, and all the rest of it. We believe, in all sincerity, that the " gentlemen " do not realise the sufferings of their unfortunate victims. They and their fathers before them have become so used to look for worship, and the worship has been so submissively paid to thenj^ud all their belonginga that they have come, in fact, to regard them^ives as possessed of feelings and wants that are by no means shared in by the " common people "as they call them. Colonel Gordon, then, does not know what he is doing ; he might as well offer that landlord £lUOO to go down into his dog-kennel for a week and feed on greaves, and that is an insult so gallant a Boldier would offer to no man.

MUBDEKKD.

The London 'limes, one of those newspapers that calnily walks over everything that stands in the way of coercion and oppression for Ireland, and in whose wake some of our contemporaries out here go hobbling along grotesquely enough, 6ays, " Trying by means of social war to compel a landlord to submit to Griffith's valuation is trying to make him submit to robbeiy." But what are we to consider trying to compel a

tenant to pay a rack-rent on penalty of, it may be, death. If the one be robbery, surely the ether is something like murder. And let no one suppose that death has not been, and is not Btill occasionally, caused by eviction. Two instances of this have within the last month or so been made public. The one is that of the old man Kavanagh, who died on the threshold of his door, as he \ras being carried across it to be flung into the ditch, on the order of the Right Honourable Earl Fitz william. But the beaiers finished their task upon the corpse and laid it down by the roadside, under the roof of One Who we may be very sure has recorded the deed. The other was that of a boy of seven, who took his death of fright at seeing his mother violently dragged out. He eat no food from that time, raved in Mb sleep, and died in four weeks. How many such deaths, however, hare there not been that were never reported to the public ? They are legion ; and, though the newspapers have said nothing about tbem, their memory lives in the mind of the Irish people throughout the world. Is it not an English saying that " Murder will out," how, then, do the English newspapers rail at those appointed to reveal it 7

" BULLY " FOE PfiOFESSOR BOBEBTSON SMITH.

Our contemporary, the Otaga \Daily limes, from whom we have in our day learned so much that is neat and perspicuous, has also instructed us that the matter of mileage is most important. Justice herself, he says, is to be guided by it, so that whereas at one milestone she may without damaging her reputation blink most astonishingly from under her bandage, at an another milestone she must not dare to shake an eyelash. "We have been prepared to find, then, that -what could not now be said in Ireland without bringing the speaker under grave suspicions has been said in Scotland without incurriag for the speaker the least doubt. At least we cannot conceive that any one will have the temerity to find fault with the loyalty of a famous minister of the Free Church, no matter how revolutionary the expression of his sentiments may sound. Can it be, however, that the Rev. Professor Robertson Smith, who is the minister alluded to, has been himself so harried by the hounders-down of heresy that he, as a matter of necessity, sympathises with all who suffer from tyranny, and adopts their cause. But, whatever may be the explanation, of the matter, it is certain that, in the sermon delivered by him on St. Stephen's Day, at the Kelvinside Free Church, Glasgow, there were passages that would justify the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in going back as far as last October to arrest any preacher in Dublin. " Rebellion," said the Rev. Professor, "on the part of an oppressed people, who have vainly sought relief by constitutional means, is one of the inalienable privileges of mankind." The rev. preacher, however, is a prudent man. As a commander in war, we have no doubt, he would be one of those to put his " trust in God and keep his powder dry." "It -was, indeed, a crime," he continued, " to undertake a hopeless rising against the established authorities, because such a course would necessarily bring increased trouble without bringing deliverance to the oppressed. But in such a case the criminality lay in the reckless display as to time and means, and not in the assertion of the two principles that rulers were established for the sake of their subjects, and that their subjects acting together on the ground of a common oppression, were entitled to depose a ruler who had ceased to make the good of his people the principle of his rule." A practical man i& tbe Professor, then, and one who, we can well fancy, would, as a matter of course, turn the whale of Jonah into an hotel, Bide your time, he says, and then rise ; but it will be a mortal sin for you to strike a blow before you are quite sure of making an impression. That is the way to talk to an oppressed people, and we could wish, for the 6ake of seeing Professor Robertson Smith in his proper place at the head of a troop of heretical Covenanters well armed, that Scutland was oppressed in some kind of way and driven to rebellion with, every prospect of success. It is, we need not say, too much for us to claim that the Professor was giving out Scripture for the use of Irish Papists in their extremity ; that would work his ruin at once. There would not be the ghost of a chance of his escaping the ire of tbe Ecclesiastical Courts then, but, his rottenness>s to Deuteronomy and Jonah would be as plain to them as daylight, and as objectionable. Meanwhile Irish Papists may like the dogs, pick up the crumbs from beneath the table of the Free Churchmen to serve in the day of need. And if Free Church Ministers elsewhere choose to go on in a small way with speaking of Irish sedition and murder, let them comfort themselves with the thought that Professor Robertson fomitli is, after all, a heretic. There is still balm in Gilead.

csisir: oy s. LIGHTER HUE.

Colonel Gordon gays, again in Mb letter that •' crime in Trpland is not greater thau that in England." He might have gone further without danger of exaggeration, and said it was not so great. We have seen a deal of English crime lately, not indeed of goed will, but because we have felt obliged to report it as a set off against the loud howl prevalent with regard to crime in Ireland. Nor have wo yet done with the matter, for the howl in question is still ringing abroad Here then are a couple of paragrapb.B clipped from the

Ti?nes J weekly edition, December 24th : — " Two poachers were encountered on Saturday night by gamekeepers on Lord Holmesdale's estate in Norfolk. One of the poachers struck at a keeper with his gun, which exploded, inflicting a mortal wound upon himself. — Two gangs of poachers were encountered on Tuesday morning by Lord Bute's keepers, near Cardiff, two of whom were so brutally beaten that fears are entertained for their lives. The same gangs also attacked the keepers on an adjoining estate, and severely injured two of them. Illegal fish poaching continues in Wales. The local police has been reinforced, and many arrests have been made." We have seen poaching in Ireland, too, in our time. It was when some young fellow, overcome by a love of sport, shouldered a fowling-piece, and went off in the broad daylight to have a shot at a snipe, or a partridge on forbidden ground, and trusting to his keen sight and quick foot to bring him out of the reach of the guager or bailiff. But that is a different thing from the midnight expeditions of gangs bent, for the sake of profit, on slaughtering game to a great extent foreign and maintained at heavy expense, and fully prepared to commit murder if interfered with in their plundering. Is the life of an English or Scotch gamekeeper of less account than that of an Irish land agent ? The telegraph is totally silent concerning outrages of the kind referred to, and the newspapers make no comments on them. Again, we find the following suggestive paragraph in a London weekly of December 18th :—": — " Mortality among Infants, — Mr. Humphreys held inquests on Monday at Bethnal Green on two children, both under 12 weeks old, who, according to the ver.licts returned, had met their deaths Ly suffocation whilst in bed with their parents. In the first case, in answer to the coroner, the mother stated that she had had six children, five of whom had died in infancy. In the second case the coroner said : Mrs. Stanbury, I think we have met before ? Witness : Yes, sir. The coroner : About three years ago 1 Yes, sir, but that one died of convulsions. Was not suffocation the cause of death ? I think it was. I advise you to be careful. How many children have you had ? Eleven, sir. How many now living 1 One, sir. They all died in infancy ? Ye», sir. The coroner remarked that he bad appointed eight similar inquiries for that day." Are the mothers in question to be numbered amongst the 16,000 murderers of children reported of to Parliament by Dr. Lankester, a ccording to the Westminster Review, or do they only go towards forming a separate class of suspects ? On the night of Christmas, again, a woman was horribly murdered with a red hot poker at Macclesfield, by a man named Btanway, and although this murder was remarkable both from the time and method of its committal, we find it but cursorily mentionedIt is evident our telegraph clerks and journalists consider a crime committed in Ireland of double the guilt of one committed in England, and there is a certain sense in which we agree with them.

PSALM SINGING.

We perceive that a mighty descent of the singers of " psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" on this colony is contemplated. The " Salvation Army " is moving towards us, so at least report sajs, and they are Evangelists of lusty voice. Messrs. Moody and Bankey also are thought to be possibly turning their minds in our direction, and all bids fair to raise a wave of sound here that, whether harmonious or not, should direct our thoughts heavenwards. We do not know, however, that the singing of such canticles is by any means, without exception, a cause of conversion. The natural man is very much given to noises ot the vocal sort, and, somehow or other, religious songs seem to chime in with his natural tastes in a marvellous maimer, but so that while they afford him means he finds most pleasant for the exercise of his lungs and voice, they leave him pretty nearly where they found him. We have, in our time, heard many an " 'Arry " most vociferously hymning, and yet, " 'Arry " he remained all the term of his life, and " 'Arry "he died. And we find that it has alwayfi been so : the Arians, a most unconverted people, were noted for their hymns, and, in a word, at all times the ungodly seem to have strangely affected them. The most remarkable example, however, which we find of this strikes us as being contained in a letter written by some worthy Huguenot to Catherine de Medicis, and which we take from the Rente des Deux Mondes of December 1, '79. It runs as follows, so well as we understand its somewhat antiquated French :—": — " This Father, full of mercy, put it into the heart of the late late King Francis to hold as very agreeable the thirty Psalms of David, with the Lord's Prayer, the Angelic Salutation and the Apostles' Creed which the late Clement Marot had transcribed and translated, and dedicated to his Greatness and Majp sty. Which commanded the said Clement Marot to present the whole to the Emperor Charles V., who received the said translation beningly, and rewarded it both by words and by a present of two hundred doubloons that he gave to the said Marot ; giving him also courage to translate the rest of the said psalms, and begging of him to send him as soon as he could Conjitemini domino qvoniam bonvs, since he so much loved it. Seeing and hearing which the musicians of these two princes, namely, all those of our France, set, to the best of their powers, the said psalms to music, and everyone sung them." B© far so good : here we have

had only to do with possibly decent people. What is to follow it is that we depend on to illustrate our point as to the effect of spiritual songs upon the ungodly, and, moreover, it will exhibit to us what kind of folk a worthy Huguenot, also the lover of spiritual songs, regarded even with complacency. " Bat if any one," continues the writer, " loved them and clung to them closely and constantly, sang them and had them sung, it was the late King Henry ; so that the good people blessed God for them, et ses inignons et sa nieretrice les ainwyent, on faignoyent ordinairem-ent les aimer, so that they said ' Monsieur, shall not this be mine ;' you will give me that if you please.' And this good prince was then willingly hindeiel from, giving them to them according as the fancy took him. Always he kept for himself, as you can ani ought to remember, Madame, this : Bien heureux est quiconques Sert k Dicii volontiers, <fee. Himself set music to this psalm, which music was very good and pleasing and well suited to the words, sang it, and had it Bung so often, that he showed evidently he was goaded and anxious to be blessed, even as David describes it in the said psalm. . . . Ido not forget as well yours that you asked to be often sung ; it was : Vers lTSternel, des oppress lo pfcre, Je m'en iray. . . ." Catherine de Medicis, Henry 11., an 1 others, at least no better than them, then, were all singers of psalms and spiritual songs. What hope, therefore, is there tnat psalm-singing is about to convert the ungodly amongst ourselves, or have those songs a power when shouted by the Salvation Army, or en toned by Messrs. Moody and Sankey that they fail to display when sung in the Chambers of Princes 1 Have the canaille ouly souls capable of conversion by song ? We are under a cloud with respect to this matter ; but revival, perhaps, breaking in upon us, by means of our startled hearing or cracked voice, may by-and-bye enlighten us : we shall await it with much patience.

A BTTJDKNT OP SCBIPTUKE.

It was not, however, only with the " Word " »b given to her in the rhyming of Huguenot poets that Catherine de Medicis was acquainted. We learn on the authority of the writer who has given us the old letter from which we have quoted, that even in heT youth, when she was Dauphiness, this lady of fell memory owned a Bible in the French tongue, and we are led by the information to in« quire whether it may not afteT all turn out that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was the fruits of private interpretation. Since Catherine's time many a self-authorised imitator of Israel in the Land of Canaan has wrought havoc upon his enemies, depending on tha Bible, and why may not such a result have also followed from this Queen's study of the Old Testament 1 It will, however, be news to a good many worthy people, and ill fits in with the great Protestant tradition to learn that Catherine do Meiicis, the Queen of the St. Bar» lomew, had been a student of the Bciiptures in the vernacular.

A FLAGRANT UNTRUTH.

OtJE contemporary, the Boston Pilot, asks if it is Mr. Moody who tells a story of his having hobnobbed in a spiritual sort of way with the Catholic Bishop of Chicago. Mr. Moody, if it was Mr. Moody, called on the Bishop, and. Mr. Moody kuelt down and said a prayer, and the Bishop knelt dowu by his side and said another, and then they both got up mutually delighted, and went their several ways refreshed and enlightened. The Boston Pilot Bays that, if Mr. Moody said that, he said something that was a little more than his prayers, and he asks was it Mr. Moody who said so? We believe it was ; we know it was either Mr. Moody or Mr. Sankey, for some six or seven years ago, when these gentlemen were in England, a friend of the writer of this note, who was bent upon his conversion, and who had sat under these famous ministers, wrote him a long letter about them, and told him as especially edifying that very " whopper" relating to the Bishop of Chicago. Our answer was that whereas up to tha moment we had had no reason to suppose that Mr. Moody or Mr. Sankey, whichever it may have been, was not an honest man, although s much erring one, we were now forced to alter our opinion, and consider him as a man who had mo regard whatever for the truth. The Boston Pilot has been correctly informed, at least as to one. of these two evangelists, and he has not bee-n one bit too severe in his rebuke of such unblushing impudence — notwithstanding his heavy hand.

A suggestive incident ("ays the Le'mster Leader), occurred at Edemlerry Onion on Saturday last. As two leading ex-officio members of the board were coming from the board-room after the meating had adjourned, they were accosted by an inmate of the workhouse, formerly an elected member of the board and a victim to landgrabbing ere Boycotting was in fashion, who drew himself up stiffly before them, and, with hands behind his back, enquired of one of the J.P.s," Did you see up there ? " (meaning one of the guardians). One of the J.P.s, bowing politely, and touching his hat deferentially, replied, " No, your honour. I did not see him." To which the man " honoured" retorted, " Arrah, begorra, it's lately you got to be bo polite in your manners." The J.P.s proceeded on their way.