NEWS OF THE WEEK.
AVERY disheartening and discreditable scene took place in the House of Commons on Monday night, in a discussion on the charges for criminal prosecutions in Ireland. The Irish party, headed by Mr. Healy, while protesting that they did not in the least wish to express sympathy with crime, made a violent attack on the Irish Administration for its prosecutions of c iminals, making every individual case in which crime had been detected and punished to which they alluded at all, the subject of violent accusations that the Crimes Act had been used to oppress the innocent and to restrict the liberty of the poor. Mr. Healy spoke of the war between tenant and landlord—including, apparently, assassinations—as civil war for which an " amnesty" ought to be proclaimed ; Mr. Harrington declared that " perfect knowledge" of Myles Joyce's innocence was in the hands of the Lord-Lieutenant when he ordered his execntion,—" perfect know- ledge" being altered, on the expostulation of the Chairman of Committees, into "perfect evidence," if the Lord-Lieutenant had chosen to avail himself of it; Mr. O'Brien said that in the opinion of nine Irishmen out of every ten," the system of criminal prosecutions in Ireland,—which he described as " infamous,"— was "responsible for the greater number of crimes committed last winter,"—which only shows, if it be true, that that system must have been greatly ameliorated, since the number of crimes committed last winter was so very much smaller than the number committed in the winter previous. Further, Mr. Healy called Mr. George Bolton, the Crown Solicitor in Dublin, "the most blackguard and profligate ruffian in the service of the Crown," and after Mr. Bolton had been most effectively defended by Mr. Gibson, Mr. T. P. O'Connor said that the impression produced in Ireland was that a Court of Justice was being degraded to the position of a Ribbon lodge. But, so far as we can follow Mr. T. P. O'Connor's opinions, that, so far from being a degradation of a Court of Justice, would, in his eyes, be a great feather in its cap.
