NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE state of Ireland is still the great anxiety of the Govern-
ment, and is, we fear, an increasing rather than a diminish- ing anxiety. The area of disturbance spreads, and the intensity of it grows. We believe that the Government have not yet .decided on their immediate course, and we trust it may not be to call Parliament together again to suspend laws in the name of 'law, but rather to use the existing law—including, of course, the lase of the Army, whenever and wherever it is necessary—for the enforcement of authority and the suppression of violence. It may be that the Government will take a different view, and awe admit that the temptation to put an end as speedily as possible, and with the minimum of actual display of force, to .outrages on public order, is a very strong one. But we believe that if that course gains something in the present, it loses more in the future, through the injury thus done to the reverence for law and liberty. " Any one can govern with a state of siege," but every one who governs with a state of siege finds the diffi- culty of governing, without it, one that steadily grows upon his hands. Mr. Parnell is accumulating for himself a terrible moral responsibility, in fomenting this popular ill-feeling against the most strenuously reforming Government which Ireland ever had, and to all appearances, chiefly for the very reason that Mr. Parnell cannot trust it to leave Irish grievances un- redressed.
