We wish that we- could record that with the closing
of the year the Irish Free State was making definite progress in the re-establishment of law and order and that its opponents were being defeated. Unfortunately the facts seem against this view. Note, for instance, the murder of the ex-member of the Dail reported in Thursday's papers. As is shown in the very able article contributed to this week's Spectator by our correspondent who has lately visited Ireland, the firmness adopted by the Free State Government, for which the Irish people as a whole should be grateful, has not helped them. It has alienated rather than won, national sympathy. In spite of our belief that the breaking of the Union is going to prove a fatal inheritance for the South of Ireland, we are most deeply anxious that the Free State should succeed in its task. We say this in spite of the fact that we very greatly dislike its form of reprisals. It cannot be right to imprison men for one crime and then take them out and shoot them, not for the deeds for which they were being punished but for crimes committed by other people—crimes in which it was physically impossible for them to participate even in the remotest degree.
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