The Fenians seem to have a special regard for Clerkenwell.
It was in Clerken well that they tried to blow up a prison fifteen years ago, and it is in Clerkenwell that they have just been storing the Snider rifles, revolvers, and rounds of ammunition which were seized yesterday week in a stable there, hired for that purpose by Thomas Walsh, whom the police seem to have identified with other Fenian enterprises. There were 400 Snider rifles and needle-guns, with bayonets, and twenty-four cases of revolvers, a good many kegs of gunpowder, and between 90,000 and 100,000 rounds of ammunition. The evidence given before the magistrate when the prisoner was first charged has not brought out as yet anything as to the uses to which these arms were to have been put, and while some think they were to be sent over to Dublin, others suppose that they were meant for the use of a select body of men who were to make a raid on the Bank of England,—where a raid successful even for an hour or two might, no doubt, do infinite damage to the credit of the country ; for example, by destroying the Book of the Debt,— which ought, by the way, always to be kept in duplicate, a carefully-photographed copy being stored in one place, while the Book itself is guarded in another. Documents essential to the credit of the country ought not to be liable to accidents even of this exceptional kind.
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