The worst of all the features of the Irish problem
is the loathsome cruelty which the people evince towards those whom they choose to regard as taking the landlords' side ; and not only against them, but against their innocent cattle. The Knight of Min writes to yesterday's Times to relate a case in which the peasantry burned alive eight bead of cattle belonging to a tenant of his who had taken a farm from which a man who had been a defaulter of rent for five years together had at last been evicted, and had fearfully mutilated fifteen head of cattle belOnging to another tenant. In the case of the latest Galway murder, not only was the murdered man's widow, Mrs. Finlay, jeered and hooted in her grief, but the brother was prevented from attending the funeral by the savage threats of the people. And yet it is into the hands of those who stimulate these horrors that Home-rule will throw Ireland. In the Irish World of February 27th, according to a corre- spondent of Friday's Times, is printed the receipt of the Rev. Mr. O'Reilly for a cheque sent to the Parliamentary Fund by Patrick Ford, the well-known advocate of a dynamite policy in America. This dynamiter is addressed as "My dear Sir," and is heartily thanked for his contribution, though the contri- bution is accompanied by another for the purpose of creating "a reserve" for a more violent policy, "in case John Bull fails to render simple and long-delayed justice." As the leaders of the Irish Party thus treat with courtesy and gratitude the organisers of the worst violence, is it conceivable that they really condemn the people who hoot broken-hearted widows, made widows by agrarian murderers ?
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