The Parnell Commission has been chiefly engaged this week in
taking the evidence of outrages during the period of the Land League's and the National League's greatest activity, and the reasons which the Times' witnesses assign for thinking that they were ascribable to the influence of those Leagues. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Mr. Albert Chester Ives, the Irish correspondent of the New York Herald, was examined as to Mr. Parnell's very frank communication to him in 1880 concerning the agitation Mr. Parnell had just commenced,—a communica- tion in which Mr. Parnell avowed his belief that a true revolutionary movement in Ireland should, in my opinion, partake of both a constitutional and an illegal character." At the same time, Mr. Parnell declared his intention to have himself nothing to do with any illegal Associations. On Tuesday, Sir James Mennen decided a point of some im- portance, that evidence of outrages may be given before any prim'-facie connection between those outrages and the individuals incriminated by the Times' articles has been established, since the proper legal mode of dealing with asserted conspiracies on the part of bodies professing to have perfectly legitimate aims, has always been to go in detail into the evidence that these Associations have not kept within their professed and legitimate sphere of action, but have really existed for the purpose of carrying other and illegal ends.
Previous page
