On Monday, Mr. Healy and Mr. O'Donnell attacked Mr. Forster
with more than usual ferocity, in relation to the tearing- down by the police of the Enniscorthy placards inciting the people to assemble in their thousands at Wexford, to see the ,collection of unjust rents,—Mr. O'Donnell requesting to know whether it was because Mr. Forster was described in those placards as " Buckshot Forster" that the police tore them down, and afterwards asserting that Mr. Forster had applied the term 4-‘village ruffians" to "respectable traders, poor-law guardians," and persons of that class. Mr. Forster treated the question as to " Buckshot Forster " as one of deliberate insult; and sub- sequently pointed out—what, of course, Mr. O'Donnell perfectly well knew—that he had only applied the term " village ruffians" to those who were themselves guilty of outrages, or of directly inciting to them, and that the placards were pulled down be- cause they incited the people to unlawful interference with an auction. But it really matters very little what the true answer to this kind of question is. It is put only as a mode of baiting the Irish Secretary, and the more constitutional he is in the use of a very exceptional and, in some sense, unconstitutional
power, the more he will be baited. Mr. Forster boars this baiting, for the most part, with the stoicism of a politioal Red. Indian. Indeed, if he would forbear less, ho would probably have less to bear.
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