The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1866-02-20 00:00:00

INTO or THE MULL

I.—TO-DAY oc To-morttow Her Majesty
returns to Windsor, but previously, on
Monday, the Royal Assent will have been
given to the first nieseares of the session,
the Act for suspension of the habeas corpus
in Ireland, and that for the repression of the
Cattle Plague. We do not think that the
needless speculation and groundless alarm
Inhich attend the formed step on the part of
our Government are at all likely to prove
well founded—or that the Executive really
possesses information calculated to raise
serious apprehensions of an immediate rising
in Ireland. In both matters the mill-horse
track of routine, has, in reality, been followed
with singular steadiness; for the suspension
of the Irish hsbeas wear, in 1848, haying
led to the oomplete suppression of Smith
O'Brien's ~ate in Widow M'Cullagh's
cabbage garden, although, by forcing on
prematurely, the crisis of the intended
rebellion—this course has simply been
retraced in the present instance, and the
Waal carpus is again suspended, cost what
it may; whereas, the measure which had
simultaneously been passed against a less
easily repressible enemy, the Cattle Plague,
is simply we perceive the reecho of the
measure of last cei Miry, down to the
compensation clauses, which, although is
deference to Mr. Bright's anti-bucolic &easy,
it has been reduced from two-thirds to one.
half, is simply a resumption of the well.
known Mr. Sharpe's office, where, however,
the farmer of this time one hundred years
ago, obtained three-fourths' value for such
animals as actually died upon his hands, and
were buried by him ten feet deep, and not
for such as were merely compulsorily
slaughtered (if any were). One wonders to
think how faded must have been the piece of
red tape out of which Sir George they
untied this old precedent. But to return
for a moment to the other new measure for
repressing the Fenians The suspension of
the habeas corpus, has a sound so repugnant
to British, not to say Irish liberty, that one
instinctively looks for something stronger
than the comparatively recent precedent of
1848, to justify the very frequency of having
recourse to an expedient, which, in plain
terms, sets aside for the time toeing, exactly
so much of the constitution under which we
live, as insures the personal liberty of the
subject. But there really seems to be no
other course open in dealing with Irish
insubordination—especially in this instance,
in which its roots ass deeply and thickly
implanted where we cannot reach them on
a foreign shore. The effect of the recent
Commission of Justice, the punishment of so
many of the prime conspirators, and the
vigilance of the authorities at Dublin Castle,
appear, however, to have had no influence in
impeding the progress of preparation for an
outbr-ak. The Fenian emissaries continue
to swarm about the Irish towns and villages.
the factories of pikes, and the castings of
rifle bullets, crop out as actively as ever; the
very soldiery in the Irish garrisomi, and it is
believed the constabulary in the police
barracks, like the general body of the
warders in Richmond prison (now all sus-
pended owing to fresh disclosures) appear to
be tainted and leavened with this infectious
discontent and fallacious expectation. To
arrest and ..earch Yankee officers who,
warned by the past, take care to have about
them no treasonable documents, has beeome
so futile, that the Goverment of Ireland
imperatively requires the use of an irres-
ponsible power of arrest, in order to check
the seduction of a too credulous people from
their allegiance by theme hired emissaries of
the Fenian organization. And, probably in
Ireland, the exercise of such • power may
serve to paralyse the efforts of these
intrignanta ; but, that will not, we fear,
affect the machinations of the American
brotherhood, nor will it diminish the teal of
their multitudinous adherents in the lower
Irish wards of Glasgow, Liverpool, and
Manchester, numbering hundreds of thou-
sands, (rote whom no email portion of the
Irish money-supplies is known to flow. We
now return to the Cattle Plague, mixing up
these subjects in admired disorder, for really
we do not know how, and time alone will tell
which of them demands precedence. The
result of Friday's discussion, it will be
noticed, was not only to concede to Mr.
Bright a diminished scale of compensation;
but the Government sustained its first defeat
of the Session on a division against the
amendment of Mr. Ward Hunt, who is
the representative of the ultra-agricultural
interests of St. James's Hall. The numbers
were 264 to 181, the majority against Go-
vernment for a more stringent rule regarding
the moving of cattle being 88, and our readers
may probably entertain a suspicion that this
result in some degree foreshadows the coming
event of the great coofiict of the same
elements on the question of the Repeal of the
Malt Tax. The Bill is brought in provides
for the compulsory slaughter of all infected
cattk, tie ordering of which it renders im-
perative on the local authorities, whilst it
enables them permissively to order also the
slaughter of animals exposed to contagion; in
the first instance ta o-thirds, and in the latter
case three-fourths the value was proposed to
be allowed as compensation, but not in any
case exceeding £2O and £25 respectively.
Compensation, we may inform those who I
have already sustained loans, is to be rare-
spectie•—that 11—it is to extend back to
those whose cattle may have hitherto been
slaughtered by authority; and two-thirds of
the amount was to be provided from a county
rate, the other third by a cattle rate of not
exceeding bs. per head tenants being
authorised to deduct from their rents half th e
rate levied upon them. The Commission& s
of Public Works are empowered to borrow
on the security of these rates, and the local
magistrates are warranted in the remission
of the rate in the case of those who have
sustained serious lasses. Besides this com-
V6°l7 Slaughtering with compensation, the
Bill provide* for the prohibition of the re-
moval ef cattle, their isolation, the disinfect-
ing of. premises, and the regulation of lin-
portatons by sea. The pervading principle
principle of the Bill is the application of
thew general rules to the whole country, and
from these rules no local authority possesses
the power to deviate. But although the Rill
lays down rules for the whole country with
regard to the removal of eattle, it necessarily
leaves to the local magistrates the enforce_
mint of these rules. Thug, the removal of
mttle under cloud of night becomes in the
meantime altogether illegal, and indeed cattle
cannot even at other times be moved ezosyit
by license ranted by the locil authorities
mark, conditions laid down in the Act. It is