"CRIME" IN IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 411, 25 February 1881, Page 19

"CRIME" IN IRELAND.

{London Universe, Dec. 18.) We have been dosed to nausea of late with narratives of crime in Ireland, The London papers were short of •' copy," and they seized on every little scrap of news which came across the Channel with the greed of a hungry cat pouncing on a mouse. If the notorious case of Lawson against Labouchere, or some spicy disclosure of obscene scandal in the Divorce Court came on for hearing, or if the House of Commons were holding its debates, we should not have heard a tittle of these " terrible tales." They came as a God-send to the despairing sub-editor. He is rot a scrupulous man. His consuming ambition is to prepare his wares for the market — to have a catching line on hia bill of contents. The edition must be sold, even though the character of a nation be maligned. Pat being unpopular at the moment, on the shoulders of Pat the burden of public indignation must fall. He is striving for rights out of which he has been too long choused, and bullied, and coerced. The anger of a naturally fair-minded people must be turned against him by elaborate reports, prominently printed, of mock turpitude and manufactured outrages. An English labourer places dynamite on a railway track ; an English chemist distributes tools for procuring abortion at cheap rates to suit customers, an English nurse poisons a patient, an English mechanic outrages and murders the child of his benefactor, an English husband attempts to murder his wife with a poker, and, missing Mb aim, brains the baby at her breast. But these are mere insignificant crimes — these we are accustomed to — such as we may be prepared to meet in the ordinary course of civilised life. They occurred in England. What we want is something happening in Ireland. The demand creates the supply. It now transpires that a set of clever, but unscrupulous, romancers, the mongrels o£ journalism, have been living by fabricating outrages in Ireland and sending across reports of them for publication in the English press. Now it is a threatening letter — any cowardly humbug with a pen and an ink-bottle, a sheet of paper and a postage stamp can make one ; anon it is an attack by men with faces blacked like Christy Minstrels ; on another occasion it is a shot — very likely fired at nobody out of bravado by some drunken half-sir ; and again it is the blowing up of a barrack which is still intact in its masonry ; or the '• Boycotting " of a good landlord, who writes to say that he is cheered wherever he goes among a grateful people ; or the commission of some awful turpitude in the county Clonmel, which is not to be found on any map yet produced. No matter ; all is grist that comes to the greedy sub-editor's mill.

Now, what is plain, undeniable truth 1 Every social upheaval such as we are now witnessing in Ireland, irrespective of the country in which it takes place, is preceded by a species of disruption of the community, in which men's passions will get the better of them, and a larger proportion of offences may be expected than in more piping and peaceful times. To take England by way of illustration, no measure of reform has been achieved without a preliminary burst of excitement. One example will be sufficient in proof. The passing of the Corn Laws was attended with each an outburst, when lordly castles were burned down, and the Duke of Wellington, who had been hailed as saviour of the country, was pelted with stones thrcngh London streets. In Ireland, like rule has obtained. Catholic Emancipation was vouchsafed, not because of the palpable justice of the grant : but, admittedly, to avert the horrors of civil war. The abolition of the obnoxious tithes was the inevitable outcome of the massacre of Carrickshock. The present Premier has publicly owned that he would not have undertaken the abolition of the hateful and most unfair Church Establishment, where the millions had to pay for the hostile creed of the hundreds, had not his attention been compelled to it by the attack on the police van at Manchester and the explosion at the Clerkenwell Prison. Singularly enough, in this instance, although the feelings of the Irish people are wrought up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and although they are intentionally provoked by the myrmidons of monopoly from Chief Justice May down, whenever it can be done with impunity, there is no appreciable increase of crime. There have been but five homicides, which can be traced as agrarian, since the Land League agitation was s*.t on foot. The suffering people are sober and self-contained, but they have made up their minds that they have a right to live on the soil they fertilize with their sweat— that they will no longer hand over rackrents to unkindly absentees, and that it is wrong that in an island, out of which the territorial proprietors draw fat incomes, the cultivators should have to make periodical appeals to the charity of the universe to enable them to keep body and soul together. They know that the position which they have taken up is logicaly invulnerable, because they feel that they are persecuted. The tight shoe chafes them, and no honeyed assurance that they are more comfortable than they think can gloze over the truth, or deaden them to the fact that their feet ache. They have made up their minds, we repeat, and that it is which vexes the spirit of those who treat them unjustly.