At 13r1etol on Friday week Mr. Birrell, alluding to the
murder of Constable Goldrick as a "lamentable and horrible event," noted that it had occurred on the estate of Lord Clanri- carde, the chief black spot in Ireland, and said that "to repre- sent that he [Mr. ]3irrell] was responsible for having created that foul feeling which had existed in that place for fifty or sixty years was a monstrous lie, which would not be made, and never had been made, in Ireland, where everybody knew the facts of the case." Mr. Birrell for a very clever man has a singular talent for misapprehension, As Sir Robert Anderson remarks in Tuesday's Times, nobody holds him responsible for the criminal propensities of those who dwell in the disturbed districts of Ireland :— The charge he has to meet is wholly different. It is that, while he has all along possessed ample powers to afford adequate protection to the law-abiding classes in such districts, he has deliberately refused to use those powers. Nothing that his opponents have ever said of him is more damning to his reputa- tion than is his bold avowal that it is with full knowledge of the condition of the country that he ham persisted in his policy of inaction. In view of these admissions of the Bristol speech, the responsibility for poor Goldrick's murder must be apportioned between the men who fired the fatal shots and the Minister who refused to take measures to restrain them."
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