At a meeting of the National League Committee held on
Christmas Eve in Dublin, Mr. Healy made a characteristic- speech, charging the Government with having paid the extra- vagant expenditure of Mr. Vincent Scully's contested election out of secret-service money, in order to widen the split between the Parnellites and their opponents. " He would say," he declared, " that the money paid into the Freeman's Journal was the money of the Castle." No doubt he would_ Indeed, we should like to know the thing which Mr. Healy would not say, without an atom of evidence for it, if it suited the purpose of the party with which at any time he happened to be co-operating. Mr. Healy seems to us to have no more scruples as to what " he would say " than Mr. Parnell himself,. though he has never avowed, as Mr. Parnell did, that he pro- bably intended to mislead the House of Commons. It would never occur to a legal intellect like Mr. Healy's to make so- damaging an admission ; but the manner in which he propa- gates malicious conjectures like this, for which he does not even- pretend that he has a trace of evidence, of the Government's. spending secret-service money on Mr. Parnell's behalf, suffi- ciently shows how pliant is Mr. Healy's political conscience in permitting himself to aim poisoned arrows at his foes.
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