In respect of the Irish Yeomanry, there is a vacillation
and timidity about our worthy Ministry, not very reconcilable with the- In respect of the Irish Yeomanry, there is a vacillation and timidity about our worthy Ministry, not very reconcilable with the- boldheartedness of their chief. There is, we suspect, on this and on other subjects, "a law of the members" of the Cabinet that wars against " the law of its spirit, and bring-eth it into bondage."- What can be more childish—more twaddling, with reverence we- say it—than the argument, that because a Yeoman is yet to be tried for his misdoings at the Newtownbarry massacre, therefore the Government must sit still, and neither blame nor commend the Yeomanry ? If there be any truth in men or Irishmen, the Yeo- manry either fired without any orders, as one side alleges, or fired much longer than they were ordered. Their fault is not a moral one, which it is Heaven's part to avenge ; or a legal one, which it is the law's part to avenge ; but a military one, which ought to be avenged at once, whether Heaven prove in this case " slow as men count slowness," or the law prove, as it commonly does in the Sister Island, both slow and partial. Government are called on to mark their sense of the lack of discipline displayed by the New- townbarry corps. Supposing the firers were justifiable both as men and as Christians, they were clearly not justifiable as soldiers. They have committed a military crime ; and in depriving them of their arms, which they evidently do not know how to employ, they are visited with no more than a military punishment.
We have a word to say of the decriers of the Yeomanry, as well as of their defenders. How comes it that Irish gentlemen will on all possible occasions make it a matter of principle to mar a plain story by their manner of telling it ? Seventeen lives lost, fur- nished, surely, quite sufficient grounds for claiming the attention of Government to the Newtownbarry Yeomanry. Why get up a story about ripping up of women great with child ? Why bring the truth into suspicion by such needless exaggeration? Mr. LAMBERT claims credit for the possession of warm feelings. Let him possess them still : but in his warmth of feeling against the Yeomanry of Ireland, let him exhibit some warmth of feeling in defence of plain fact, which he has no more right to murder than had the Yeomanry to murder Mrs. Mullowney. The tale is a horrible one, tell it any way you like; but its horror wore a very different character when it was represented as an act of coldblooded barbarity, from what it does now, when it is described as the effect of a shot which, for any thing that appears, might have been fired at a venture.
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