WEEPING AND WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 33, 14 December 1883, Page 7

WEEPING AND WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH.

(Dublin Freeman, October 20.) The beading which we have given to this article simply reproduces the essence of that feeling which must necessarily animate the minds of those politicians or apologies for politicians who expected that a good loud beat upon the Orange big drum, in the orthodox 12th of July fashion, was the only barrier which it was necessary to interpose between the North of Ireland and the progress of Irish Nationality. Times have changed with us lately, and we find that while the " village ruffians" of the Forster regime are quietly advising the people of the North to register their votes, and prepare for a general election, the "constitutional" advocatt ■ of law and order ate firing revolvers, to the imminent danger of their own friends, and talking about " lining hedgerows with rifles " in defence of their own " fads." Be it so. Once, all of us who held that Ireland was not the Heaven-sent appanage, the private covert, of any tyrant class to hunt over with impunit.y were denounced as " veiled rebels," as enemies of the Constitution, as assailants of the " integrity of the Empire," We may innocently have acted all these parts— Heaven knows we get very poor tuition in any other direction — but when we came to better ourselves by all the wise counsel that we got and undertook 1 o replace the pike by the platform, and to substitute independent speeches for indiscreet sedition, we found that a marvellous transformation was the remit. The "rebel" South appealed to the Constitution, while the " loyal " North betook itself to window-breaking, to pistol-shooting, and to nun-slaying, in testimony of its love for Constitutional liberty, and its abhorrence of disorder. Be it so, we say again, and those who have for their own profit pulled the wires of the party of monopoly in England now feel that no bigger paity blunder was ever perpetrated than that of which the junior Tory " leader's " visit to Ulster wa9 the embodiment. But that party was not the only loser. Irishmen in the past were content to regard Sir Stafford Northcoteas a good-natured and courteous if somewhat im> potent travesty of a statesman . He has been shown up by his own faction in the North, as having forfeited any right to be protected even, by those provisions which should hedge a gencleman from unduly coarse handling at the instance of his opponents. The outrage at the Ballynafeigh Convent produced his personal disavowal of complicity, but similar disavowals of complicity in outrage made by the Land League leaders were greeted in past times by the right hon. gentleman and his followers with durisive contempt. This is their logicMr. Healy makes a speech in Sligo to-day, a bailiff is shot in the same townland this day week, it is obvious that Mr. Healy 's violent speech was the moving cause of the crime. But Sir Stafford Northcote—the man who away from Lord Salisbury's apron strings poses (Heaven save the mark I) as Lord Salisbury's "leader,"— A*; raises a mob to a pitch of excitement that culminates in the siege of a convent and the death of a gentle lady who was its head, and he is only " maintaining the integrity of the Empire !" Good. This is too strong even for the aveiage English Tory, and we leave the bigots of North and South to weep, to wail, and to gnash taeir teeth over the fact that their rowdyism is disowned by their English sympathisers, while it has only stimulated the action of the Irish nation, which has determined that such venal scoundrelism as Ballynafeigh ana Kosslea have witnessed shall no longer stand between a united Ireland and her destiny.