23 NOVEMBER 1867, Page 2

A strange scene was enacted on Monday at the Home

Office. A deputation of eighty persons, headed by a Mr. Finlan, waited on Mr. Hardy to petition for a respite to the Fenians. Mr. Hardy declined to see them, whereupon Mr. FinIan told the deputation to enter the antechamber next to which the Home Secretary was sitting, ordered out the messenger who remonstrated, and then and there constituted a public meeting, which he addressed in a speech threatening to rouse Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, and prophesying that Government would bring blood on its head. After much more violent language, a posse of police appeared, the orators were ordered out, and a scene without a parallel in our recent history came to an end. No outrage seems to have been intended, but the sudden burst of lawlessness under such circumstances, the intimidation of a magistrate being a highly penal offence, has deeply irritated Eng- lish feeling. A violent Irish meeting followed on Clerkenwell Green, but on Thursday the leaders had recovered themselves, and at a second meeting the language was moderate, and a resolution arrived at to seek an interview with the Queen. The deputation for that purpose was courteously received at the Castle, but in- formed, of course, that Her Majesty acted only through her constitutional adviser. Gentlemen who saw and heard these meetings say the speakers seemed cruelly in earnest in their sympathy for the prisoners, and that much of their violence of tone was due to an effort to make that earnestness apparent. It is arran'ged that a funeral procession shall march on Sunday, from Clerkenwell to Hyde Park, but we do trust that the more sensible leaders of the movement, like Mp. Connolly, who openly disapproved the scene in the Home Office, will interfere. Let him just read the news from Birmingham, and think what London will be like if he succeeds in rousing anti-Irish feeling.