A great crime has been committed in Ireland. Lord Leitrim,
a wealthy Peer, noted for the sternness with which he governed his tenantry—who sat, however, at low rents—and for his hatred of the Irish Land Act, was on Tuesday morn- ing driving from his residence in Donegal to Derry, with a clerk named Macken, and a carman named Buchanan. He was passing through a wood, when two men, firing from the trees, shot the driver dead, and wounded -Macken, no that he died soon after, and then with a second volley wounded Lord Leitrim. They then attacked him with bludgeons, beating him about the head till he expired. The men then escaped, crossing Mulroy Bay in a boat, and have not yet been arrested. The latter part of the tragedy was witnessed by Kincaid, a servant of his lordship, and a carman, but they were apparently afraid of being killed, and did not drive up or arrest the murderers. The cause of the crime was the agrarian hatred which Lord Leitrim had excited by his evictions, and his stern though not greedy management of his estate, and it is suggested that the other two men were killed to suppress evidence. They may, however, have been killed to clear the road for the shots at Lord Leitrim. Macken was no object of 'hostility, as he had not been in the Earl's employment a fortnight ; and Buchanan was a regular carman, hired to drive his lordship about. The tragedy has revived bitter feeling in Ulster between landlords and tenants, and has in England provoked much strong and unjust denunciation of Irishmen and the Land Act. Neither is responsible for a crime which from other causes might have happened anywhere.
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