MAAMTRASNA AVENGED.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 510, 19 January 1883, Page 13

MAAMTRASNA AVENGED.

(From the Weekly Freeman, November 25.) Ok Tuesday the closing scene and climax of the trials for the MaamBtrasna massacre, was reached in Green-street Courthouse. The fourth and oldest prisoner put forward withdrew his original plea and substituted one of " guilty." The four men remaining, and in custody charged with the murders, followed suit — threw up the sponge and cast themselves upon the mercy of the Court. They were all, jast as those who had been convicted by the juries, sentenced to death on the same day in Galway Jail. Tbe shambles of Maamstrasna are avenged, and the bloodshed, hideous and appalling, calling louder than the surf upon the unnumbered pebbles of the shore, to heaven for retribution, has been answered by the slow but sure decree. In four months from that autumnal night whose peaceful beauty they disfigured and disturbed by a crime, or series of crimes, before which most modern instances pale, tbe band whom Providence designed should be trailed along the most traceless hills and traced through the winding defiles will swing upon the ghastly gibbet under whose shadow they now stand. Unattended by human sympathy, unpitied, unwept, the cruel savages in whose souls there was no pity for the murdered granddame, the stalwart man, their fellow ; the tender youth, the fair young girl awakened from her sleep, " Fresh as a flower juft born, And warm with life her youthful pulses playing," shall go to the gallows. Out of their own recreant companionship have come the hardly less guilty hands delivering them up to justice. We seek in vain for parallel outside the annals of civil war or the traditions of copper-coloured savagery for the crime which has made of Maamstrasna an Irish Glencoe. Orangemen have come down iv the black penal days upon a Catholic' townland, and smote their Papist enemy hip and thigh. Red Indians have fallen in dead of

nighfeupon a hostile tribe or settlement of white men, and left .not a living man or .woman or child toitell of the horrors of the carnage. But for peaceable Irish peasants, animated by what fell spirit we know not, moved by what awful orders we know not, to descend upon the isolated cabin of their countrymen, and not only their countrymen, but the men and, women to .whom they were tied by every link of blood and comradeship and common fate, that, we say, ■ has no precedent in our history. We trust it shall never have its [ companion picture in our future. The Attorney-General seemed: to hold out some straw of recommendation for mercy from the capital punishment to the wretches pleading guilty. 'But upon that we hare not a word to say, cave that the only disappointment ±he immanity of the country will receive is that the ruffians who turned approvers and who were confessedly accomplices in the butchery will nob be hanged also. The juries who have done their duty with such faith need no commendation from us. They have been, fairly selected. They have been composed of. our fellow-citizens, Catholic and Protestant. Their conduct is the best rebuke to the tactics of " standaside," which we felt it our duty on a recent occasion to expose. They have proven that . Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant, require only a case to be proven .before, them not to shrink from their verdict. They have gained the commendation of the fair and unimpassioned Judge. They are supported by thecommon, feeling of their countrymen ; they are our justification when we said 'that it needed no jury-packing to obtain convictions when cases were proven in Jreland,;.and they have the consolation of feeing not only Jibat they have done their duty, but-that the accused persons themselves have acknowledged the guilt of which they have beeu convicted. " It will be, we hope, a lesson to the Crown and to Crown officials. The Catholics on the panel' have r been accorded their rightful place and trust. They have shown that they do not shrink from the honest andhonourable.discharge oiduty the most irksome, and that when the evidence justified the verdict they are prepared to find it without fear, favour, or affection, according to their oaths. We believe that a Galway jury would have . done the same without flinching. Mournful is it to contemplate that just on the threshold of Christmas the old Western town should be the scene of expiation so terrible as the 15th of December will witness within the walls of the jail. We must go back behind the present century to find a spectacle in Ireland, tbe like of which has now to be contemplated in those eight condemned persons, ranging from the white-haired man of 70 to the young peasantiin his prime. And even in English annals one has , to go back to 1784: for anything like it, when, as we read,'Boswell itelis Johnson that on tbe 23rd June, in that year, he had cbme r frbm seeing fifteen men hanged at Newgate.