THE DUBLIN MASSACRE.
ITo THE EDITOR OE THE " SPECTATOR...3 Sta.—In your ib8U0 of November 27th you say that ten of the murdered officers are being given a public funeral with full military honours in London, whilst the others will be buried in Dublin with similar ceremony. I enclose a cutting from a newspaper which gives an account of the funeral of Captain Fitzgerald in Dublin. You will see that he WEIR buried with military honours, but there the parallel ends. The body was not taken to the Cathedral; there was no imposing ceremonial like that at Westminster; two priests conducted the funeral service at the cemetery, but no Bishop or other dignitary was present, nor were any of the municipal authorities even repro. sented.
One may contrast this with what took place about a fort night ago. Imposing ceremonies were then being held in the leading Roman Catholic churches throughout the South of Ireland conducted by scores of priests and attended by thousands of worshippers; the object was to pray for the repose of the soul of the "martyr," Kevin Barry. That mis- guided young man had been hanged for a murder he had committed in a street in Dublin;, the day of his execution three other terrible murders took place, but no reference was made td the victims of those crimes. There is nothing new or surprising about this; it is only what has been going on in Ireland for a long time. Some months ago a young man who was taking part in the noble work of destroying a police barrack had an accident with a bomb he was trying to throw, which resulted in his death. He was conducted to his grave by 150 Republican soldiers, followed by a train of vehicles a mile long; the coffin was placed for the night in the Roman Catholic church, and whilst there was visited by hundreds of people who wished to pay the last tribute of respect to "the youthful hero who had made the supreme sacrifice out of love to his country." Lord Hugh Cecil says that every decent man regards the Sinn Fein murders as abominably wicked. If so, the proportion of indecent men in the South of Ireland must be very large, and it is surprising how many of them have keen elected to exalted positions.
It is only a few months since Lord Ernest Hamilton's History of the Rebellion of 1641 appeared, but events have been moving so rapidly lately that in a sense it is already an old book. It is interesting to read it now in connexion with what is going on at the present moment. The author complains of the unfair line taken by previous historians. Anxious to throw as much blame as possible on the English settlers, and as little as possible on the rebels, they slur over all the horrible outrages committed by the Irish at the beginning of the rebellion—some historians omit them altogether; others hint that the evidence of their having taken place is untrust- worthy (although, in fact, there are few incidents in history so well attested), and the 'few who do feel obliged to refer to them devote only a few lines to the subject, and then proceed to give detailed accounts of the outrages committed by the settlers at a later date without investigating the truth of the evidence or mentioning the fact that those which really did take place were committed by infuriated men whose wives and children had been put to death with horrible tortures. Is not this just what is being done now? What English Radical said or did anything to urge the Government to punish the murderers of policemen during the whole of 1919, or to strengthen the few efforts that were made to repress crime? But now an orator will say a few wordsexpressing his horror of crime in general, and then proceed to a detailed and violent denunciation of "reprisals." He will assume without evidence that these reprisals are directed by the authorities; he will describe what was at most a case of culpable negligence as wilful murder; lie will wax furious about the wanton destruc- tion of creameries, not mentioning the fact that some of them had been turned into fortresses by the Republican army. One Member of Parliament will give a harrowing account of a boy being bayoneted to death, though he must have known that nothing of the kind had occurred; another will rend out a long list of towns attacked by uniformed servants of the Crown, accompanied with wrecking, looting, and arson, though as a matter of fact nothing of the kind has occurred in many of the towns he has enumerated. These are the means which unpatriotic politicians will resort to when their only object is to gain a party triumph over their opponents.—
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