THE BELFAST RIOTS. T HERE is one point of view from
which Irishmen never seem to regard these Belfast riots, and that is the -civilized one. The Catholics abuse the Orangemen, and the Orangeman slanders the Catholic, but neither party censure with anything approaching to just severity the inept magis- tracy who profess to govern Belfast, and who annually sur- render the town to scenes that would disgrace an African vil- lage or a Western backwoods settlement. Here is a great city full of industry and shipping, with a trade which is making millionaires, and a population of workmen better paid than any other in Ireland, which can keep a thousand ship car- penters in full work, and boasts itself the commercial capital of a great country. It is full of large buildings and rich ware- houses, crowded with citizens who want only order to be as wealthy as those of Liverpool, with a body of police armed to the teeth, a magistracy adequate at all events in numbers, a corporation so powerful that the permanent bone of conten- tion is supremacy in the Council, two or more stipendiary magistrates, and the power of collecting two or three thou- sand soldiers in a few hours. Yet this town is every year given up to the dominion of the most ruffianly -class of its own population, to men capable of killing children because they are educated in schools not under priestly con- trol, or dragging girls along the street by the hair of the head .because they happen to be Catholics, of wrecking Protestant chapels and burning priests' houses, of beating men to death for refusing to curse the Pope, and kicking women into fainting fits because their husbands do not believe in the real presence. These riots, moreover, which disturb all trade and arrest all improvement, which divide the citizens into irreconcileable factions, and destroy the whole influence of the moderate, which endanger more lives than an ordinary battle, and fill the madhouses with patients under the incurable lunacy which is produced by sudden terror, never spring up in a moment. There is always some signal given, some pro- cession proposed, or ceremonial ordered, or opportunity of collision widely announced, some alarum struck the meaning of which is understood by every man in Belfast. They never either end in a moment. There is always a little fighting one day and a little vengeance one night, an attempt to wreck houses the second day and a furious battle the second night, a riot on the third day and on the third night the city given up to terror, and the snob, and the soldiery with loaded rifles. Yet nobody ever seems to have the brains to foresee what everybody expects, nobody has the power to enforce the ordinary rules of civilization, to maintain external order in defiance of an unruly section and a very small section of an unarmed and well-to-do population. Two streets, or rather faubourgs, are allowed to keep Belfast in perpetual terror, to triple its police-rate, and deter capital by spreading abroad a just impression of personal insecurity. There is no want of power. There are plenty of police and the police are armed, plenty of soldiery and a Belfast mob will no more face the soldiery than a London one, plenty of magistrates, and an entire machinery in Dublin supposed to be specially intended to support high-handed repression. Yet in spite of the expressed wishes of all the respectable classes, of an immense loss inflicted on the trade of the town, of the heavy police-rates which follow every imeute, and of the dis- gust of all the rest of the country, the local magistracy every year allow the riots to begin and increase and grow to a head without any active measures for their repression. The cor- poration ceases from its envenomed chatter to shrink aghast before a mob yell, and in eight days of tumult everybody is mentioned except the mayor. The magistracy forget that their first duty is to maintain order, and either through fear of consequences, or secret favour to the rioters, or simple in- capacity to meet an emergency, allow the evil to grow till the riot becomes an insurrection only to be put down by the bayonet.
Take these present riots, the most savage which have dis- graced even Belfast for twelve years. They began in the effort of a parcel of Orange roughs, aided by a few boys and girls, to discredit a demonstration in Dublin in favour of O'Connell by burning the Liberator in effigy. The proceeding was one of senseless savagery, but among a sensible popula- tion it would have passed unnoticed except by a quiet jeer ; it did not hurt O'Connell, or the Catholics, or anybody, or anything, except the reputation of the few educated fools who instigated it, and who cannot recognize their own greatest men. The affair was, however, accepted by the other faction as a challenge, blows were given and insults, and then Sandy Row, the Orange stronghold, rose elated with the prospect of another carnival of brutality. A day of assaults on priests' houses roused the Pound, the Catholic fortress, to retaliation, and then for one entire week Belfast was a scene of outrages such as on the Continent would have called for a state of siege. The two mobs marched about wrecking houses, dis- persing small parties, beating individuals nearly to death, and stoning their common enemy the police, not because it did anything but simply because it represented a hated civiliza- tion. Of course the factious being Irish, and unpunished, and in full enjoyment at once of cruelty and liquor, gradu- ally worked themselves into a state of savage fury, and on Mon- day the Catholics stoned a school of 1,200 children, killing one, gouging the eye out of another, and injuring many more, and then proceeded to repeat the scene in another street, " when they were turned by about twenty workmen armed with sticks." The Orangemen, who had been amusing themselves by beating the mill girls as they passed to their work, kicking them and dragging them along the street by the hair, hearing of this new outrage attacked their opponents in large bodies, seized fire-arms, and but that the military were at last in the streets ready for action hundreds of lives would have been taken. At it was the gunsmiths were plundered, private houses were gutted, men and women beaten down and trampled on in the streets, the mob, says the Northern Whig, whose report wo have used, only losing its courage just when the military came in sight. On Tuesday " upwards of thirty people received gunshot wounds," the military and police were compelled to fire, and the Catholic navvies challenged the Orange ship-car- penters to open combat, on Wednesday fifty Catholic dock- yard men were driven into the Lough and " potted at" while struggling with the mud like wild-fowl, by Wednesday night 1,900 infantry, two troops of cavalry, and 840 armed police had been collected in the city, while 800 more police had been ordered in from the surrounding counties, five companies of the 84th Foot had been:despatched from Dublin, the 78th High- landers were under orders for service, and artillery was either forwarded orput in readiness for immediate despatch,—an event which has not occurred in an English city since 1848. Bel- fast in fact was in insurrection, and garrisoned like a city in a state of siege, to meet mobs turned by twenty resolute men, and retreating the instant they perceived the soldiers. There is not the slightest reason to believe that a resolute mayor, backed by five hundred soldiers, and prepared when necessary to use his force,—to fire ball on the mobs as on any other gangs of savages in insurrection, could not have reduced the town to order at any given moment, arrested every pro- minent rioter, and compelled the disorderly to remain im- prisoned in their homes for twelve hours, there to recollect themselves. There was plenty of force, all that was wanted was some man possessed of legal authority and resolution enough to use it unflinchingly and against both factions alike, —but there was no such man in Belfast. The Roman Catholics declare that the magistracy are biassed, the Orangemen assert that the soldiers are always let loose on them, but we believe the plain truth to be this :—The local magistrates feel that if they did their clear duty residence in Belfast would thence- forward be unpleasant, and they shrink from their task not out of any fear of immediate consequences but from dread of the consequent unpopularity. So fierce is party feeling in Belfast, so utterly contemptuous are both parties of the first principles of civilization, that the man who quelled the riot as such riots should be quelled, might, possibly would, be execrated by the townsmen, and the Belfast gentry who would stand up to fire readily enough have not the nerve to risk continued popular hate. It was necessary to send a stranger, Major Esmond, of the Dublin constabulary, to do the duty the local magistrates and especially the mayor ought to have per- formed for themselves,—to send a soldier in order to teach a municipality civil courage. The disgrace of such an occur- rence attaches not only or principally to the ruffians who for eight days have been wrecking houses, and killing unarmed men, and kicking women in Belfast, but to the upper class who have not turned out to repress these outrages, the magis- trates who have not had the civil nerve to use the force at their disposal. The scum of a great city once let loose is expected to be violent ; but in London if the magistracy were slack the mob would be met by another mob twice as brave as itself, better armed, and with an order to which the rioters, carefully as they were led to the least dangerous places, can lay no claim. It was not till the eighth day of the riots that Belfast bethought itself of special constables, though all the while there must have been a force of sailers in the port which for a few shillings a head would have supported the gentry in measures of the most stringent kind. There appears to have been an utter absence of authority, of any official men determined not to check this or that faction, to arrest Orangemen or disperse Catholics, but simply and solely to maintain civil order at any hazard or any sacrifice of life, and the want is as discreditable to the town as to the Govern- ment which is perpetually quoting its prosperity as the redeem- ing feature in the situation of Ireland. Order began to triumph from the moment of Major Esmond's arrival; why was he not sent before ? What is the sense of allowing a row to grow into a riot, and a riot into an insurrection, rather than take the most ordinary means for the preservation of peace ? There would have been no need in the first instance of bloodshed. The moneyed classes can always command physical support sufficient to maintain order, and had there been but one determined man authorized to employ special constables and able to lead them, the whole affair would have ended in nothing worse than a few broken heads, a serious result enough in London or Bristol, but in Belfast mere child's play. Even had there been bloodshed that would have been better than a reign of anarchy in a city which exists by virtue of the com- merce anarchy drives away.
It is time this kind of thing should end, that the experience of twelve years should be put to some use, and that two streets in an Irish town should be prevented from bringing disgrace upon an otherwise civilized kingdom. It is quite evident that neither the Belfast magistracy nor the Belfast corporation can be trusted to maintain order, and indeed a committee never is of any use in an emergency. A council of war never fights, and the Guildford magistracy the other day were nearly as help- leas in presence of their roughs as the magistracy of Belfast. The city needs a local Act empowering some one man not elected by the people, say a Deputy Lieutenant carefully selected for the work, to assume supreme authority, the control alike of police, soldiery, and special constables, whenever the chronic hatred between the two sections of the population threatens to burst out in -act. Such an officer being responsible to Government would at least treat both the factions impartially, and give the elements of order existing in the town some little of the guidance and coherence and fearlessness of responsibility they appear at present so greatly to want, secure for decent citizens tho- protection against open ruffianism which in the worst cities of the Continent is never absent. Such an appointment would interfere very little with ordinary municipal self-government, and in Belfast self-government means the right of a Sandy Row mob to break the heads of a Pound gang, and of both to. abuse and maltreat and plunder decent citizens with complete impunity. Franchises and municipalities and local magis- trates are all excellent things in their way, but even in Ireland civilization must be established before their excellences can be at all properly appreciated. Self-government was meant for people who can see a banner without smashing its bearer's head, who can show their dislike to a Protestant school by taking their children away, and who can refrain from the dear delight of stamping on women's stomachs because their husbands object to curse an Italian of eighty whom they never saw.
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