29 AUGUST 1874, Page 2

Another brutal murder has been perpetrated in the South of

Ireland, near Clonmel, in Tipperary, not very far from the scene of the strangely frequent crimes which we lately noticed. In this last case, again, the motive seems to have been mere plunder, and the gains of the murderer were miserably small. The Irish, whatever their tolerance of agrarian outrages, or of resistance to the police, have been proud, and very reasonably, of their exemp. lion from the baser and more disgraceful forms of murder. But nothing baser or more disgraceful than the series of crimes that has lately horrified Munster has ever been brought home to a civilised community. The worst of it is that the law- abiding, respectable people seem to be directly responsible for this outbreak of brutal, unscrupulous greed. Murder for money is a type of crime that can be certainly held in check by severe and certain punishment. But in Ireland juries will not convict, and criminals are encouraged very strongly to hope for escape, even if they should be unlucky enough to be detected. There is no excuse for the pusillanimous weakness of the juries ; they do not by any means give expression to popular feeling by letting off the mean-minded scoundrels who beat the brains out of helpless women or aged men for the sake of a few shillings, and the popular Press of the South of Ireland is doing its duty by telling the jurors that their foolish clemency is disgracing their country. The infectious character of crime; and especially of such crime as murder for money, when it is allowed to go un- punished, is a familiar deduction from the facts of judicial experience.