The Sun.
London, England, 1837-09-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

It is a very convenient sort of Code Veridique
which the Tory journals seem to have established
amongst themselves. If a mis-statement appears in
any one of them, all the rest are at liberty to give it
currency, and accompany it by remarks accordant to
their particular views, without incurring any portion of
the responsibility which attaches to the authors and
disseminators of a falsehood. They are a sect of lite-
rary smashers. The moral culpability begins and ends
with the coiner. To utter with a guilty knowledge is not
considered a crime in their community. All that is
wanted for the purpose of keeping up a continued
currency of lies is a single reckless organ, bold and
clever enough to provide a constant succession ; and
from his repository the whole land may be over-
run with every kind of abomination, through the
purest and mast honourable of all possible chan-
nels. Thus the Times, under its soubriquet of
W.," has afforded the Standard, and several
caller cleanly journals, an opportunity of bely-
ing a number of Irish Members of Parliament with
a good conscience. "M. W." alleges that these
gentlemen are " Papists." The Standard knows that
they were a few weeks ago, at least, " nominal Pro-
testants" (which means, in the peculiar phraseology
of the Standard, such Protestants as Archbishop
Whatley, Bishop Sandes, Lord Charlemont, and Sir
Richard Musgrave) ; but not having seen them in
church since the dissolution of Parliament, it is " not
sure that they remain in their first faith ;" and upon
that satisfactory warranty it gives utterance to the lie
of " M. W." without a single syllable of doubt or
qualification. Yet all the while the Standard is free
from the last design to mislead or deceive the public.
This is a very " simple plrn" of turning the Devil's
doings to a godly purpose. With respect to Irish oc-
curences, our London journals have yet a readier me-
thod ; for import all their fabrications in print from the
Sister Isle, and have nothing to strain their con-
science withal, unless when they choose to adorn the
stories which they cull from the provincial journals of
that country with some rhetorical flourishes of their own.
Leland abounds with vehicles of intelligence in whose
columns a Tory imagination may well delight to revel.
There are Constitutions, and Sentinels, and Standards;
durum et venerabile nomen !—(not forgetting the
Ulster Times), whose principal business it is to am-
plify and bemonster trivial occurrences for the London
market ; for such prophets have little honour in their
own country. No respectable Tory conversant with
the leal state of Ireland would attach implicit credit to
a single statement resting upon their sole authority ;
but our metropolitan organs are less nice. They
gieeddy seize upon the grossest and most extravagant
st itements put forth from those quarters, and argue
upon them, as if they were literal and ascertained
oths. A short time since a statement appeared in
the Mayo Constitution, and was transferred with so-
le nn and awful significance into the columns of the
Standard, under the imposing title of •' The Ribbon
Conspiracv," which represented that an army of Rib-
bonmen, twenty thousand strong, Infly armed and
disciplined, had assembled by night at a place called
and held inilitaiy possession of ,s certain field
until 8 o'clock on the folloe:ing morning. This appeared
passing strange, and we waited with some curiosity
ustil the DuLlin Gazette, which notices occurrences
( I much inferior import, should throw a li&it ueon
so fo.mitlable a inneter. But we waited in vain. Th‘..!
Gazette eschewed all mention of it ; nor vet could we
gather from tire Limerick Chronicle that any extra-
ordinary movement of troops had been made upon that
pair of Ireland, in consequence cf sa dangerous a de-
monstration of the Ribbon forces. Being disappointed
f gleaning anything from the pu)lic sources of intel-
ii,.ruce, we sought informc.tion in another quarLr, and
are now enabled to state, and pledge ourselves to the
correctness of the statement, that time twenty thousand
17;61onmen—those " gentlemen of the shade' —were,
is the language of the eloquent ex-Member for Wigan,
" mere moonshine." The total number of persons
assembled did not exceed one thousand, and their
meeting at those unseasonable hours was occasioned by
an arrangement made between two gentlemen, one of
them a political friend of Colonel Perceval, and there-
fore an Orangeman, or at least a Tory, to violate the
laws of God and nazi by fighting a duel. No person
who is even slightly acquainted with the practice of duel-
ling as it is maintained in Ireland, can be ignorant of the
extreme anxiety of the peasantry to witness such en-
cc unters. It is a sight for which they would overcome
any possible obstacle of distance, or endure any sacri-
fice of ease, of comfort, or of profit. In Cor;naught
particularly their eagerness to behold gentlemen
shooting at one another is a perfectly irresistible pas-
sion. When Dick Martin of tender memory, went
nut to kill his man before breakfast, or George Ro-
bert Fitzgerald proceeded, according to the Bobadil
system, to annihilate the whole race of Brownes and
Binghams in the order of their course, they could not,
by the most secret management, contrive to transact
those delicate affairs in peace and quietness; but the
hills were covered with gaping spectators, and the field
itself so crowded, that the combatants were often
obliged to fight in a lane of human bodies. On this
late occasion (which was a political duel), a report
had been circulated by some malicious person, that
the Tory champion, Mr. Griffith, was to be accom-
panied to the field by an escort of Sligo Orangemen ;
and in consequence of this statement a number of the
country people came to defend their neighbour, Mr.
Kelly, some armed with pitchforks and. such other
weapons as they could obtain. But not many of them
were armed, nor was the least violence attempted. Mr.
Griffith appeared on the ground adjoining Doo Castle
attended by two or three friends ; the second of his
antagonist proposed that they should get into their
carriages, and drive away from the presence of the
populace to some sequestered place. They did so.
without experiencing any interruption from the people,
who, being satisfied that their favourite would have
play, dispersed in peace ; and the gentlemen who had
come thither to violate the law, repaired to a more
convenient spot in the adjoining county of Sligo, where
they mutually cleared their honour, by endeavouring
to spill each other's blood. This is the simple truth
of the chant in the Standard, about
The Ribbon King and twenty thousand men,
Who marched to Doo, and then marched home again."
Our readers will allow that this affair, with the ac-
counts which the Tory journals have given of it, is
but a new edition of Much Ado about Nothing. We
come now to a more serious subject, that of the mur-
der of two men, Protestants, who, on their way to
the Sligo election, were waylaid and beaten, then tied
together, and left in a secluded part of a mountainous
district to perish. They were not found for six days
after the outrage, when one of them had expired, and
the other was so much exhausted that he died shortly
after. It was a most abominable and atrocious crime ;
but we must protest against the Standard's attempt to
implicate all the inhabitants of a populous district in ,
the commission of it, and against an assertion which he
makes without the slightest foundation, that " the state
of the murdered during six days was as well known to
all for ten miles round, as to those who beat and
tied them,"---and that " the whole district were ac-
cessaries in the atrocious villainy." Even the
Ma yo Constitution—the author of the twenty thou-
sand armed Ribbonmen at Ballindoo, which is the
Standard's sole authority, does not dare to state any
such thing. It distinctly says that the unhappy suf-
ferers were left far from the haunts of men, or the
reach of assistance :" and what right,' then, has the
Standard to assume that all within ten miles of the
place were cognizant of their situation, and accessary
to their slow and miserable death ? What right has
it to say that this is a national crime, or to appeal to
it as an illustration of the " social state of the Roman
Catholic part of Ireland, and the all•pervading power
of the Ribbon conspiracy ?' When, not three months
since, on Mullyash mountain (within a few miles of
the Diamond, that Irish Glenco, which Colonel
Verner and his constituents have lately commemorated
in " potations pottle-deep"), the Orange prowlers stole
in the shades of night upon a group of joyous children
laughing round a bonfire, and shot two of them
dead, wounding two others, did we seek to in-
culpate the Protestants of Ireland in the guilt
of that fiendish assassination ? Did any portion
of the Liberal Press point to it as showing
the social state of' time Tory part of Ireland, or was it
even made a topic of declamation by the popular can-