LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
LORD SPENCER.
[To THE EDITOR OY THE "SPECTATOR."] Six,—You observed in one of your notes last week that " Lqrd Spencer [at the Eighty Club] spoke of the attacks made on Mr. Parnell as surpassing in vehemence and bitter- ness and wickedness' any which hare ever been made against any other man." Lord Spencer forgets as completely as he forgives. Permit me to send you the stirrup-cup full of "vehemence, bitterness, and wickedness," with which Mr. Parnell's organ, United Ireland, took leave of Lord Spencer, June 13th, 1885. So poisoned a chalice was, I think, never before offered to any man's lips :— " With all the stubborn force of a cruel, narrow, dogged nature, he [Lord Spencer] struck murderous blow after blow at the people under his rod. He stopped at nothing; not at secret torture; not at subsidising red-handed murderers ; not at knighting jury- packers ; not at sheltering black official villainy with a coat of darkness ; not at police quarterings, blood taxes, and bludgeoning of peaceful meetings, the clapping handcuffs and convict-jackets upon Members of Parliament, mayors, and editors; not at wholesale battues of hangings and transportations by hook or crook ; not at burying the proofs of his victims' innocence in their graves. When Mr. Harrington was chained to the plank-bed for making a moderate speech his colleagues retorted with a hundred speeches more out- spoken ; when this journal was prosecuted for seditious writing, its writings carried the war into the inmost penetralia of Dublin Castle. The unctuous Pharisees who bewailed the crimes of the Irish people were taught to look at home for the machinery of crime and murder, and for leprosy that shunned the eye of day. Not an inch of ground was ever yielded, the tyrant grew to fear the ghosts of his own ill-deeds more than the Irish people feared his steel or gibbet. It was a long and agonising and doubtful duel ; but the patience, courage, discipline, and unsuppressive spirit of the Irish people have conquered. The ghost of the murdered Galway peasant has proved stronger than all the wiles and terrors of Green Street, and all the quicklime that Earl Spencer could heap upon his bones. With Earl Spencer to his lugubrious limbo departs probably the last strong' Englishman who will ever undertake to dragoon Ireland out of her nationality by police barbarism, paid perjury, jury juggling, the immemorial informer, and the sacred rope. Hurrah!"—iinited Ireland, June 13th, 1885.
When Lord Spencer shook hands so dramatically with Mr. Parnell at the Eighty Club banquet, and then proceeded to denounce the Irish opponents of Mr. Parnell's policy as " a most miserable and despicable body," I was reminded of a certain other historic handshaking in old Rome, when each rival leader sacrificed to the hatreds of the other two a certain number of his personal adherents and friends. Mr. Parnell will sacrifice the Fenians, Lord Spencer the Protestants, Mr. Gladstone England, and then Ireland will become " a nation"!
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