AMERICA AND SINN FEIN.
ITo ens HOME OF TIE " SPECTATOR."] Sza,—Your issue of March 26th contains a letter from Mr. George L. Fox, of Newhaven, Conn., that correctly sizes up the journalistic character of William Hard, who was in Ireland some weeks ago writing for the Metropolitan magazine of New York. The Metropolitan is one of the best of our popular monthlies, but the writer protested to the publisher against the false appeals it made to readers actual and prospective when it said "Mr. Hard will write the true story of Ireland," &c. Mr. Hard, on account of his associations here, is no more capable of writing the truth about Ireland than the half-breed De Valera is capable of telling the truth about the British, or the Irish for that matter. The Hard articles are " duds." The reason is plain. America is at last wise to the Sinn Fein piopaganda. Americans are not to be fooled either by the Irish or the British. Americans are finding out the truth, but not from the mass of innuendoes that Hard has written for the Metropolitan.
Here la one example, and it will do as well as if fifty were given. The British act " by blows, by agony of • the body, by threat of death. They have done it by no means infrequently. How often, on the other hand, has anybody ever heard of Irish Republican soldiers trying to compel their captured opponents? " No, the I.R.A., dear innocents, would never torture the meanest of God's creatures, the kind-hearted. generous-souled darlings! The Spectator knows that quite recently a woman was tried by a Sinn Fein court-martial for selling milk to the British authorities. What was the punish- ment? Forcing two pig rings into the buttocks of this unfor- tunate woman.* Will Hard or the Metropolitan publish this? Of course, the Sinn Fein " gentlemen" who were Hard's guides forgot, no doubt, to mention this trifling incident, one among many other filthy outrages. Here is the Hard method of instructing the readers of the Metropolitan. A Dublin news- paperman tells Hard: "I see by the London newspapers that one of these Sinn Feiners rose up out of a hedge at a lonely spot and made a cowardly attack on a tank with a revolver." It took Hard to discover one Sinn Feiner fighting a tank; generally there are one hundred. Naturally, Hard could never toll his readers about Commander Craven, who, with a mere handful of men, all of whom were wounded before the fight was over, defended the barracks where he was stationed against an overwhelming force of Sinn Fein I.R.A.., and, in spite of the fact that the barracks were ablaze, refused to sur- render, and finally put the I.R.A. to rout. You see there were six in Craven's force, and only one hundred Sinn Feiners. Commander. Craven was murdered in cold blood last February. The fact that he commanded a British destroyer during the war that saved the lives of six hundred Americans made no difference to the murder gang. The more value he was to Great Britain's "associate" in the war the greater the necessity for
his removal. This week is devoted to raising funds for " starving Ireland." Except for two small three-inch notices in the local morning paper I read not another word has been given the public about it. Again let me emphasize. The Sinn Fein propaganda is as dead as a door-nail. By its imper- tinence and insolence, by its treason to the. United States while the war was on, all sympathy for Ireland has vanished. To iterate and reiterate, as some Englishmen do, that Ireland is a source of war between the British and ourselves, is to belittle that finest of all Nature's gifts to Americans—namely, common sense. It is to insult America's intelligence to say that we would war on the British for an Irish Republic. We will not. We have passed resolutions of sympathy in Congress for a free and independent Greece, but we left it to Great Britain, with Byron in the van, to do the recognition of Greece as a nation. We received the great Kossuth, passed more resolutions about Hungary, but we have not yet contravened our Monroe doctrine, to interfere in the affairs of Europe, this in spite of impassioned pleas by great American statesmen like Clay and Daniel Webster, and no American of the stature of either Clay or Webster has championed the cause of a free and independent Irish Republic.
In conclusion, permit me to emphasize as strongly as possible what I have endeavoured to make plain in this letter. America is through with Sinn Fein. It will have nothing to do with Corkmen's associations rioting in our principal street! and indulging in the destruction of the property of Aniericens. It will have nothing to do with clerics who tell their flocks that America is " a greater Ireland." It is done with those traitors to America, Sinn Feiners and others, who attended the " horror on the Rhine " meeting at Madison Garden, New York. It wants hyphenates of all kinds to attend to the business of America while they are here, or return to the country they came from, providing the country they came from desires their return. It refuses to condone the insults offered our President, who, among other things, was called " un-American " because he would not permit the armed forces of the United States to become a part of a parade directed against an ally, and a country with whom we are on the most friendly terms. Ii short, America is sick of Ireland, and it requires but a spark to light a flame that will teach traitors to their own country to be peaceful and law-abiding while here.—I am, Sir, &c., JOIIN MCFARLANE HOWIE.
Hotel Touraine, Buffalo, N.Y., May 14th.
[We deal with this letter in our News of the Week pars- graphs.—En. Spectator.]
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