THE DONEGAL MURDERS.
THE three murders in Donegal are most disastrous events for Ireland, for one of them was prompted by agrarian
hatred, and they rouse once more the fierce animosities of caste, and creed, and race which had begun to be allayed. Lord Leitrim, the principal victim, had, it is true, done much to provoke, though not to justify, his lamentable fate. A stern and hard man, though, it is said, just towards all who yielded to him, and liberal in pecuniary matters, he had been exasperated almost to madness by the Land Act, which legalised the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right, and set himself to defeat its provisions. He had, we are assured, a lease drawn up which it was believed would defeat the provisions of the law, required all his tenants to sign it, and evicted those who refused. With courage worthy of a better cause, he did himself the work usually left in Ireland to an Agent, and though repeatedly menaced and once shot at, continued to assert his "rights" with unsparing severity and decision. He had, it is reported, eighty evictions in hand when he was attacked and, apparently after a stout resistance, murdered, as he drove through a remote property in Donegal. The assassins are still unknown, but nobody in Ireland doubts that the crime was agrarian, a murder of vengeance, by tenants maddened by eviction, or of prevention, by men desperate with fear of the same penalty. That, however, though an explana- tion, is no justification. Capital punishment is not the fitting penalty for landlord severity, more especially when kept within legal limits ; and even in a. war, an assassination like that of Lord Leitrim, an old man shot from behind a hedge and then bludgeoned, would have been a dastardly murder. The crime as regards his attendants was even worse. There is no proof whatever that the clerk had given any provocation, or was anything but a mere instrument ; and the driver was perfectly innocent, a mere carman probably, as full of hatred against evictions as any peasant in the land. Both these latter were, in all probability, killed to prevent their giving evidence, and were, therefore, the victims of a murder as foul as was ever perpetrated in any English county. That is no excuse for the language which a part of our Press is using. Murder deserves death, whether in Ireland or England, and these were murders ; but they afford no proof either that the Celtic race is murderous, or that Catholics are 1 criminals, or that Irishmen are by habit given to assassination, or that the Land Act has evoked in the peasantry a mad desire of confiscation. The hopeless injustice of such denun- ciations, the wickedness of seeing in such a tragedy an excuse for stirring up the smouldering embers of religious and national animosity, is enough to make one despair of amity ever being established between the two countries. There is not the shadow of evidence, though of course, in Donegal, there is a probability, that the assassins were Roman Catholics. The chance that they were Celts is very slight. In the purely Celtic counties, such as Kerry, agrarian murder is as unknown as among the Celts of Scotland or the Isles, the crime being confined exclusively to the counties where an admixture of English or Scotch blood has hardened the character of the people, made them fanatic for what they think their property- rights, and changed the regretful imagination of the Celt into the brooding and vindictive melancholy of the crossed races. As to the Land Act, its effect has been almost to arrest agrarian violence, and these very murders show how deep a hold it had obtained on the affections of the peasantry. Murders are common enough in England, God knows 1 and to declare, as so many writers implicitly do, that they are less wicked when prompted by revenge, or jealousy, or lust, or
sheer brutality, than when prompted by agrarian hatred, is to declare that lives are sacred in proportion to the property their possessors own. Lancashire is not denounced because people are kicked to death there, nor are all Welshmen abused as criminals because some Welshmen, more Celtic than the peasants of Donegal, have occasionally committed murder. Such generalisations are mere provocations to race-hatred, and rouse in every part of Ireland, among Protestants as well as Catholics, the old and weary feeling that justice at the hands of Englishmen is impossible, that all are hated for the offences of a few, and that even among the culti- vated there is neither sympathy nor comprehension, nor even tolerance, for their fellow-subjects who happen to live in Ireland. It is melancholy to see that there are. Irishmen left who can defend their claims by assassination, and murdes innocent men to defeat justice ; more melancholy, to see that there are Englishmen who see in such crimes, first of all, excuses for calumnies on a people.
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