THE IRISH TRIALS.
THE action of the Government in Ireland has, so far, been decidedly successful. Our " brilliant brethren" there, as Lord Beaconsfield happily called them, have a foible deeply rooted in their characters, arising from the same source as that " brilliancy" itself, which makes agitation dangerous, and at the same time easy to repress. They are all orators by nature,—that is, are all tempted to say more than they quite mean, to give the rein to the emotion they are expressing, to be carried away by the excitement which they have allowed to develops itself, because when excited their oratory is best. They are all lesser Burkes, and Burke in the "dagger scene." They like to speak and to act under the influence of intellectual champagne, to feel the relief of letting the judgment slide, to enjoy the pleasure of recklessness alike in speech and action. Though not either the joyous or the capricious people they are often believed to be, they arc, when intoxicated, whether by mental or physical stimulants, noisier than Englishmen, and have a delight in their blood in a sort of bedevil- ment, part humorous, part mischievous, and part cruel, which in this country we find only among lads when gathered together and released from discipline. Something of boyishness, which is in one aspect very delightful, and in another very intolerable—as a delightful boy grows hateful when he will play cricket with the coals for balls, your best china for wickets, and the drawing-room carpet for ground— enters into their most serious political movements. Irishmen march to insurrection to ballad music, and after calling a Government a "mountain of iniquity," set to work to overthrow it by shying stones at its side. Upon a temperament of this kind a penal process of law acts as a schoolmaster's reproof act upon his elder boys. They are not exactly frightened, or filled with repentance for their breaches of discipline, but they suddenly recover their sense of responsibility. They feel all at once that men are looking on. When the Government stirs, the Irish feel that they are not talking after dinner, but dis- cussing business ; not thundering sentences for applause, but uttering menaces for which they may be held accountable ; not breaking bottles for diversion, hut injuring property, with a bill by-and-by to be paid. They get sobered, and a sobered Irishman is among the keenest-witted and, despite his genuine and enduring courage, among the most apprehensive of human beings. His imagination, which so often shows him utopias, shows him also consequences, and he likes them no more than the stupidest or most law-abiding Saxon. The three men selected had no sooner been arrested, than a change passed over the tone of all proceedings. The real leaders, Mr. Parnell included, who had been busily stirring the fire, damped it down with wet peat in the shape of advice to keep within the law, and give no handle to tyrannical autho- rities. The social warfare became at once a political dispute. Abuse was still heard, but it was abuse of Government, not of the landlord who wants his rent ; there were still den uncia- Cons, but they were of England in the abstract, and though the people met "in their thousands," it was not to hear invita- tions to make pikes. They met and dispersed as quietly as if they all lived in Suffolk. There are signs everywhere of that indefinable change which, in an Irishman, means that he is considering, and will very soon see, whether, loud talk having failed, he cannot hit upon some suggestion which will give him what he wants. That change of tone is everything in Ireland, and everything in the relation to her of Great Britain. There is nowhere now any disposition to oppress her. There is nowhere now any disposition to flout her. All that is asked of her is a little quiet and reasonableness, till her grievances can be discussed, and their remediableness or irremediableness fairly settled. Even with a Tory Government, there is no disposi- tion to oppress. If there is a "black Tory" alive, it is the Secretary for Ireland ; but the Government lawyer, under his instructions, is prosecuting as mildly as if the defendants were all English aristocrats ; the accused are allowed to make any defence they please, Mr. Killen's advocate in particular im- porting into the proceedings something of farce ; and they have all been admitted to bail, as if they were only libellers. No kind of treatment could be better, or more creditable to the common-sense of the Government. The law must be carried out, even though it only protects the rich, and it is carried out, just as it would be in the most ordinary Crown prosecution for revenue, without violence, or appeals to party feeling, or denunciations of the accused as if they had set the universe on ere. They have been playing with fireworks too near a magazine, and they must be restrained, but they need not be treated as if they had just poisoned their grandfathers. The -a.ccused are treated as they should be, as persons whom the Government consider misdemeanants, but who are frankly left to the regular Courts and the ordinary law. That is the true vray everywhere to meet sedition, and especially the true way in a country where the law has been strained so often that the people regard it as a weapon, where even-handed justice is observed with surprise, and where sympathy is apt to rise, like pity in Italy, into an unreasoning passion. Nobody would ever rebel if he got toothache next minute, and the nearer political punishment comes to a mild but irreversible natural law, the more efficacious is it found to be. Human nature stands up against the stake for a great cause with a dignity which cannot be manifested against a fine, and if the Inquisi- tion had been wise, it would have substituted for auto8-da-fe licences to relapse, at a charge of a guinea an hour.
The Government is right in its prosecution, right in the lenity with which it conducts it, and will be right if it demands only just so much sentence as shall mark the dis- pleasure of the law. Froward children must be set in the corner, particularly if they play with fire ; but, after all, they are children, and not aliens, and the house is a great deal more solid than alarmed friends are apt to think. Messrs. Daly and Killen and Devitt may be Fenian Head- 'Centres, as well as talkers, for what we know, and as some of our contemporaries appear to imagine ; but till that appears, and it does not appear yet, lenient legality is the best medicine possible for their complaint. Individually, they will all be cured by the prosperity sure to come to them from the prosecution—Mr. Killen, in particular, will have a brief in severy popular cause—and their countrymen will not be the snore embittered by seeing that the irresistible adversary, the Government, is free from any feeling of spite. The course adopted is a new one, but it is, we feel assured, a wise one, or rather it would have been, had the right persons been attacked.
That is the mistake the Government has made. Every Irish- 'man, Repealer or Orangeman, feels that the three men arrested
are not responsible in the first degree, that they only put into the popular dialect ideas which cultivated men had put into thliem. Mr. Parnell's skill in keeping within the law ought
not, in Irish judgment, to have saved him ; or if it ought, then the want of such skill ought not to have aggravated the offence
of his feebler allies. It is hard to be imprisoned for blundering only, and if Mr. Parnell is not prosecuted and Mr. Killen is, then the latter will be condemned for the difference between them, which is blundering, or rather the want on Mr. Killen's part of sufficiently artistic skill in statement. Precisely the same emotion was roused by the two men. To both, certain figures among the audience responded with threats of death to land- lords ; and if Mr. Parnell pleads motive, so may Mr. Killen. We are not pleading for severity against either of them, being unable to suppress the old Liberal conviction that political lenity is always political wisdom ; but if any one is remitted to the law on a political charge, it should always be the biggest. Mr. Parnell appealing, in freedom, for aid to the wife and children of Mr. Killen, not in freedom, shocks the instinctive sense of equity, which is as strong in Ireland as in any country of the world. It is said, we know, that to prosecute Mr. Parnell would be to make him an O'Connell at once ; but a Government should think more of fairness, and not quite so much of consequences which might or might not arise. We do not believe that they would have arisen. Mr. Parnell, in the House, is a formidable person, because of his fixed deter- mination, and his occasional keenness of insight into the momentary situation, but we question his ever developing into a great Irish leader. There is some jar between his nature and that of the people he essays to lead,—best, perhaps, expressed in the sentence that he does not go to cari- cature well. Even "H. B." could not make of the" big beggar- man "a figure with which Irishmen could not sympathise ; but the brawny geniality which defied that master of the pencil is not in the Member for Meath. There is a "lean streak" in his mind, as the Americans say, and in his oratory, too, some- thing that recalls the Continental conspirator, rather than the true Irish agitator. It is as if he hated England, rather than loved Ireland ; and hate is a very unfruitful quality. Be that, however, as it may, and even if Mr. Parnell is the most dan- gerous opponent England ever had, that is no reason for passing him over, in order to strike at men who do not even claim to be his equals in the hierarchy of agitation.
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