The demonstration in the Dublin Rotunda on Tuesday against the
proclamation of the National League was a very funny one. Mr. Cobb (M.P. for the Rugby district of Warwick. shire) was the first English speaker. The National League, he said, " was now declared to be illegal. What did he care whether it was legal or illegal ?" It appears that he cared a good deal, if he is rightly reported as having subsequently advised his audience " to be calm and temperate under the circumstances." He came, he had previously said, to join "in a conflict which might involve personal danger, and possibly the loss of personal liberty ;" bat we suppose that he wished to minimise that danger when he counselled calm and temperate behaviour. The calmest and most temperate behaviour would be to put a stop at once to the "Plan of Campaign" with which Mr. Cobb identified himself, and to stop all intimidation and boycotting, without which the League would be a harmless political Association enough. Mr. Dillon, however, took care that his English visitors should understand that if " calmness and temperance " were to be the order of the day, calmness and temperance must be understood as perfectly consistent with intimidation. He intended, he said, "to practise the same form of intimidation that the League was alleged to have practised, in spite of all the proclamations and all the prosecutions that they could direct against him ; and if the operations of the League in the past could be correctly described by intimidation,"—which they certainly can,—" then be said that he intended to practise and preach the same doctrines over and over again. If there were any man in Ireland base enough to back down and to turn his back on the fight, he pledged himself that he would denounce him from the public platform by name, and let that man be who he might, his life would not be a happy one in Ireland or across the seas." We have no doubt of it. We hope that Mr. Dillon's new English allies like the sound of that threat, and can contemplate without remorse their own share in giving effect to it, and suppressing civic liberty in Ireland.
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