TOPICS OF THE DAY.
--e-- THE PROCLAIMED MEETING NEAR ENNIS.
T"greatest nonsense is talked on both sides as to last Sunday's meeting near Ennis,—the meeting proclaimed by the Government, which, in consequence, was not held, though other indignation meetings were held at and near Ennis to assert the right of meeting and the wrong of the proclama- tion. The result of the meeting was certainly not a great victory for the Government, and was still less a great victory for the Nationalists. It was what the Liverpool Daily Post,—a paper in hearty sympathy with the Nationalists,—very honestly calls it, " a game of hide-and-seek." The people had no wish to come into collision with the police and the soldiers, and they avoided any collision. The Government, on the other hand, had no wish to provoke bloodshed, and they did all they could by a display of overwhelming force to prevent it,—and they succeeded. The proposed meeting fell to pieces like a globale of quicksilver under pressure. But the " men of Clare " were able to publish to the world their determination to resist the Govern- ment in every way in which the weak can resist the strong without getting the worst of it. It was a drawn battle as far as the political struggle was concerned. But the motive of the Government in proclaiming the meeting,—the wish to prevent fresh outbreaks of boycotting and moonlighting in Clare, which is the most disorderly county in Ireland,—was fully answered. The demonstration of the strength of the Govern- ment's purpose was quite impressive enough to deepen the respect of the fluid assemblies of Irishmen which met in Ennis and on the Limerick road, for the force with which they had to contend. The drawn battle will have very different results from a successful meeting, held, as it would have been, with the knowledge that the Govern- ment had not had the strength of purpose to prohibit it, in spite of its unquestionable tendency to stimulate the dis- position to lawlessness in the most lawless of Irish districts. There can be no doubt that the Nationalists selected the county of Clare for their meeting precisely because it was the county in which the meeting, if successfully held, would have the most baneful results. The Nationalist leaders often profess to deplore the crime in Kerry and Clare ; but if they really deplored it, they would carefully select the most law-abiding, and not the least law-abiding, parts of Ireland for their Home- rule demonstrations. Even Mr. Parnell is not able to affirm that Clare and Kerry are the shining examples of Ireland's fitness for Home-rule. Even Mr. Parnell, when he is anxious to reassure Mr. Gladstone (who must often, we think, have searchings of heart when he sees what is taking place in Ireland), declares that it is because the National League is least powerful in Clare and Kerry that the lawlessness of Clare and Kerry is so pronounced. But if that were his serious con- viction, he would instruct his followers to limit their efforts in Clare and Kerry to a peaceful organisation of the League, and not allow them to get up large meetings for the denunciation of the Government, in which Mr. Dillon loudly boasts of the revenge that the Nationalists intend one day to take on all those policemen and agents of the law on whose account Sir George Trevelyan was once so anxious, though that anxiety has now been all merged in his deeper anxiety to turn the Conservative Administration out of power. "The police," said Mr. Dillon on Sunday, "are close at hand, very close at hand, and when we shall be masters in Ireland, I know the reward we shall mete out to the men who have oppressed us." That is the manly threat with which Mr. Parnell's first lieutenant prepares the country which he is so anxious to see self-governed, for justice and self- restraint in the most lawless of Irish counties. Sir George Trevelyan must feel, we think, thoroughly unhappy, when he finds himself virtually backing the man who is thus bent on verifying his own gloomy predictions of a year ago. The most serious aspect of the meeting of Sunday does not, however, consist in anything done by Irishmen in the vindictive- ness of their hearts, but from the strenuous effort made by Englishmen to misrepresent the aspects of what has happened. Mr. Stanhope's conduct, for instance, seems to us perfectly worthy of his conduct in the House of Commons itself, where three nights before the Ennis meeting he had been all but openly defying the Speaker, and showing the enthusiasm for free speech of which he boasted in Clare, by doing his best to break down the authority of the freest legislative Assembly in the world. Mr. Stanhope knows perfectly well that the right of free speech is in no more danger in Ireland than it is in England ; that the Government would not have ventured to prohibit a political meeting in any part of the country where it is not dangerous to allow these tirades against the Govern- ment. And as for that organ of the Press which tells us that- if the Government had acted in England or Scotland as they' did in Ireland, " Colonel Turner and his men would have been stiff and stark long before they had been allowed to trample in this lawless fashion on the liberties of free citizens," it is not easy to believe that it wishes us to accept these big words as meaning what they say. Waa not the proclaimed Socialist meeting in Trafalgar Square not so many months ago, dispersed by the very means by which this meeting near Ennis was dispersed, and for exactly the same reason,—that it was reasonable to believe that it would lead to increased lawlessness in the neighbourhood where the leaders had attempted to hold it? We are aware that there are special laws affecting assemblies in the Metropolis, and on the legal question whether under the common law the Govern- ment had the right to forbid the Ballycoree meeting, we express no opinion, because that is a fine legal point on which we have no right to speak. But this we do say without hesitation, that, so far as principle goes, the justification for dispersing by the aid of cavalry as well as police the Socialist meeting in Trafalgar Square on the ground that it might lead to riot, was precisely the same justification and no stronger than that which the Government can plead for forbidding loud attacks on the law and the administrators of the law, such as Mr. Dillon poured forth so freely, in the very county in which moonlighting has been at its worst for a couple of years back, and in which all the horrors of Mr..Parnell's "social leprosy " have been most bitterly felt. As the journalists who talk this blatant nonsense about Colonel Turner and his men. very well know, there was no more reason to suppose that the Socialist meeting in London would lead to fresh breaches of the law than there was reason to suppose that the Ballyeoree meeting would lead to fresh breaches of the law. And if the cavalry which helped to disperse the Trafalgar Square meeting had no, "empty saddles" to show after that very pacific proceeding, there is no reason in the world why there should have been empty saddles in any county in England, had the same warnings been given, with the same solid grounds for them, which were given in Clare, and had the same events followed. It seems to us a very discreditable coarse to try to persuade the Irish people that in their situation Englishmen would have acted with more violence than they did. Englishmen certainly would not have acted with more violence, probably with less instead of more desire to defy the law ; and though these insidious hints may be accompanied with professions of gladness " that the Irish. did not empty the saddles of the hussars who broke through the meeting," Irish readers of these remarks will be very quick to understand this gladness much as English villagers under- stand English expressions of gladness that there seems to be no disposition to duck an unpopular stranger in the nearest horse-pond. The events at Ennis have ended much more peace- fully than they might have ended, bad the spirit of Monday's leading article in the Pall Mall Gazette inspired the Irish. crowd whom it nominally praises for its meekness and whom it virtually condemns for its cowardice. These English symptoms are the omens which seem to us most serious,—omens affecting the future of England even more than the future of Ireland.
Previous page
