A FIGHT AGAINST TYRANNY.

New Zealand Tablet, 8 January 1920, Page 28

A FIGHT AGAINST TYRANNY.

In the matter of crime this country (says an English exchange) has unfortunately no ground for boasting, and the efforts made by the Morning Post and other reactionary journals to persuade the Americans that the Irish are exceptionally criminal only excite ridicule and contempt. Tho Americans cannot be deceived. The Irish-Americans have made them familiar with the general character of the treatment to which the Catholics have been so long subjected by British Governments, and to-day they receive object lessons day after day as to the tyrannical manner in which the country is misgoverned. The Americans have no sympathy and never will have any with oppression, with outrages on freedom, with spying—=with the administrative methods adopted by the Government in Ireland. Such a condition have the outrages on liberty reached that now priests' pockets are searched by the police, and Irish Catholics are presented with the spectaclea spectacle the effects of which can be imagined by those who know how profound is their respect for the clergy and their reverence for tho Mass—of Father O'Donnell, an Australian Army Chaplain, being imprisoned in Richmond Military Barracks for having expressed his opinions freely in conversation and marched to a church under military custody to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice. What wonder that Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, in an interview with Mr. Goode, the Manchester Guardian's correspondent, denounced tho British Defence of the Realm Act and claimed that the Bolsheviks are more liberal-minded than the British Government. ■ ■ .