The Sun.
London, England, 1867-06-25 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE POBLIO JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The complete uttravelllng of the Shef-
field mystery suggests and compels a question of
much greater importance than the actual guilt of
half a ,dozen men whose hands, it appears, had be-
come used to blood, and who had lost all compunc-
tion. for crime. It is a question in which we have
been anticipated by the fanatical yet anxious advo-
cates of Trades' Unions, who at every stage of this
matter have eagerly volunteered extravagant de-
fences. The Unions, these apologists averred, had
nothing to do with the Sheffield outrages. They
were the private acts of violent men, no one knew
whom, upon some provocation or another, no one
could say what. Temper and pique would always
show themselves in the best of causes. The Unions,
it was exultingly pointed out, had challenged in-
quiry, demanded to be examined upon oath, and
even offered rewards, through their officers, for the
discovery of the assassins. Even now, at the very
last, when it has been brought out to the light of
day that all these horrors were committed at the
suggestion and instigation of Union officers, by
Union agents, and with Union money, it has been
asserted as a last resource that the perpetrators and
accomplices were. only some half-dozen men, who
kept their villanies to themselves, whose crimes
ndtomemerbitourziloe
were only a miserable episode in an otherwise inno-
ustheofrguanndiesaateiodn,
tamperand whowith had
e
aceentutalaly
accounts in order to procure means for hi • ring mur-
derers and to blind the eyes of their fellow-Unionists.
It was yet not only possible, but even certain, that
in this case an immense number .of people were con-
tributing the means for the most dreadful atrocities,
and deriving a certain advantage from them, with-
out knowing anything about them, or having the
least reason to suspect the authors. How far apo-
logy will go we know not; but the preliminaries of
the question are now all before us. There is no
longer the least mystery. The Executive of three
great organisations, one of them a society num-
bering sixty thousand, confesses to a black cata-
logue of murders and other outrages upon per-
son and property, committed with the utmost
deliberation, much counsel, long waiting, and in the
most business-like style. And now we ask, as it
appears to have been surmised long ago that we '
should have reason to ask, what is the mental and
moral attitude of the many thousands of persons
repeatedly hearing of the commission of hideous
crimes in their supposed interest, to back up the
laws of their union, and to punish " outlaws ?"
They could not but perceive a wonderful agreement
in the character and obvious intention of these
crimes, all of them being as much in a series and on
one code as the successive acts by which a regular
Government maintains its authority and punishes
rebels or other offenders against its laws. It was in
the general interest of the union, and all its mem-
bers, that a man was' blown up, that a horse was
hamstrung, that sever al men were shot, some killed,
others cruelly injured, that houses, engines, and fur-
naces were blown up, with whole families in their
beds, or with abortive but still exemplary conse-
quences. 'These visitations were not at random, and
though mysterious in one sense were by no means
so in another, for they were not inevitable in that
sense which we intend when we so describe the visi-
tations of Providence. This was not a power which
confounded the innocent with the guilty. It was not
as the bolt of Heaven that falls this day on the mur-
derer, to-morrow on the harmless peasant at his
work, the day after on the bride on her wedding
tour, or the village school-girl returning home
satchel in hand. Heaven may be inscrutable, not
so the Sheffield power. If it hired its agency, it
displayed its system, with all the emphasis and pre-
tence of a present deity. To the understanding of
the simplest unionist or the merest child there
was that which, or there were those who, singled
out with unerring discrimination and struck
with terrible effect all who refused to obey the
edicts and laws of the union. Whoever ventured
to break its pale or touch its dignity was smitten by
its shafts of fire. The canister of powder burst
under his bed, the bullet pierced his brain, or the
bludgeon rendered him a wreck for life. There was
no possible mistake as to the identity of the system,
of which these were the various recurrent manifes-
tations. Then came the fearful question that must
have presented itself to every mind, and that must
have harassed some with the most painful misgiv-
Was sim t
he
ings. What was this power . ply
r
wild fire of casual revenge breakin/, %ere and there,
as occasion gave it vent, or as the collision gave out
the spark of fire? Was it an evil organisation that
had intruded as
as a parasite into one that was more
healthy, as a
in the Union ? Was it a com-
mittee of safety, administering e d ath .dud destruc-
tion from the headquarters of the Union, while an
usurpation in a free State . It must have taxed
every reasonable unionist to know what this power
was—as sure, as prompt, and as successful in its
vengeance as any savage ever wished the cruellest
fetish to be. The evidence given before the Com-
mission throws some light on the surmises prevalent
in this community. It was known there were men
ready to do any evil deed, without even the apology
of a motive, for money, and with the excuse of
obedience to a sovereign authority. It was rumoured
that this or that desperado had done it, at a com-
mand from above. Whatever that higher power, it
worked with the Union, usurped the government,
and possessed the whole body. But the plain truth
is, that it matters not what the power be, whether
a conspiracy within the Union or a spirit of ven-
geance pervading its members, or whether the
governors of the Union were themselves the actual
murderers, as they are now proved to have been ;
it is all the same as regards the mass of unionists.
They had come to acquiesce in a system of so-called
protection enforced by outrage.
They had come
to 'feel their monopoly of employment dependent
on the ready use of criminal and atrocious
means. They had come to sympathise with the
assassin, and exult over his Why, even
if in their ignorance they had believed some preter-
natural power the dealer of summary vengeance
by seeming accident, or disease, or stroke of death,
on all offenders against a purely selrish code,
that belief itself would have vitiated and degraded
their minds. • If this Union—these Unions, we
should rather say, for several were linked in the
operations of Broadhead—had indeed believed that
a power worked for them from above, or from
below,—it little matters,—its religion and its
morality would have been worse than that of Thugs,
or the vilest known savage. Whoever believes,
worships, and obeys is as his god ; and if these men
had ever fancied a deity working for them in this
evil fashion, they would still have been assassins,
though fanatical assassins. Of course they had no
such belief. They only knew there was some power
or other working in a way t)o concurrent with their
interests and their passions. Whatever it was, it
did us they wished ; they rejoiced in its crimes, and
in heart and soul they identified themselves with it;
they reaped its deadly harvest, they divided its
booty, and they became what it was—one of the
most guilty and hideous things ever discovered in
this island.

TIIE " WESTMINSTER GAZETTE" ON IRELAND.-It
is with truth urged that with the preposterous
Fenian conspiracy of to-day, the higher classes
of society, the members of the learned pro-
fessions, and commercial men, have evinced
no sympathy. On the other hand it has,
with equal truth, been observed that it is not from
these classes that the pioneers of revolution have '
ever been selected, and also, that often, when in
the higher classes of society, love of country and
the natural yearning for liberty had declined, still
the fire of patriotism had burned all the more
brightly in the hovel of the peasant ; and, although
1 the history of the past be thrown aside with con-