Mr. Davitt's language is increasing in violence, chiefly, it would
seem, because be is not certain that he is not "living in a fool's paradise." At Bodyke, on Thursday, he openly incited the people to resist the law. He had "made a vow thirty years ago to bear towards England, and English government in Ireland, all the concentrated hate of his Irish nature," which, to judge by the symptoms, must be a good deal. He recom- mended the people to defend their homesteads as John Mitchell advised—that is, Mr. Arnold-Forster explains, with vitriol—and declares that "there is no violence which a man defending his home, his children, and his homestead could be guilty of that the -civilised world would not extenuate and condone." On Sunday, in a meeting at Swords, he asserted that 400 English soldiers had fled before one Irish girl—an illustration, he thought, of the condition of the British Army—and protested that if those who counselled moderation "had seen what he did," they "would have wished from the bottom of their hearts that Irishmen possessed the weapons which Englishmen placed in the hands of their mer- cenaries." He asked himself if he were not living in a fool's paradise, "while 20,000 of their young men and women were driven out of Ireland in one month alone." He would boycott the Coercion Act, and especially refuse evidence. He should ." despise the Nationalist who would not do six months on the plank-bed rather than be looked on as an informer." All this fury, it should be recollected, is expended because a landlord insists that he must either have his rent or his houses. Be it noted that the only person who adopted the easy alternative of paying the tenants' rent for them was an Englishman.
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