The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1890-07-05
.BAlFouR'S BRUTAL CRIMES.
A Vivid Description Of Ireland's Chief
Secretary and How He Runs
His Office.
HE HAS MUZZLED FREE SPEECH.
Ignorant Police Rule the Country and
Defenseless Women and Children Are
Assaulted By Them.

The latest issue to hand of the Lon
don Speaker contains the following
graphic description from the pen of
William O. Bcien of the daily doings of
government" in Ireland:
It is idle to waste breath in denounc-
ing the sayagerY of Mr.. Balfour's
AGENTS who ran amuck last week from
Tlpperary town to, Boherlahan, and
from Buherlahan to Cashel, striking
down defenceless men and women for
meeting, cheering or even shaking
hands with their representatives. There
were three more MitchelstOwns in
everything except the discharge of fire.
arms. Tbs persistency with which Mr..
Gladstone has invoked English atten
tlon to the first Mltchelstown has in
spired Dublin Castle with wholesome
dread of producing any more Mitchels-
town-at least, after the lurid pattern
Of the fist. They 6nd 1t safer to carry
on the miserable village scrimmages,
which Mr.. Morly happily foreshadowed
as ''squalid thirty years war" There
were no shots or corpses in Tipperary.
There were only persons felled to the
earth and beaten about the head to tie
number of seventy in Tipperary town,
twenty or thirty in the ten MINUTES
baton charge at Boherlahan, and better
than fifty treated in the Cashel in6rm-
sarv during the evening. Men frequently
suffer as grievously from those wounds
on the head as from bullets, and il some
cases die off q few months later, as hap
pened within the past few months to one
Of the most athletic young men il Tip
perary' who was set upon with batons
and struck on the head while he was
,lylng On the ground. The member for
North Monaghan Mr.. 2. O'Brien) will
probably suffer all his life from the ef-
fects of two fearful blows on the head
which he received by my side IN Cork;
but how many of the English public
are even aware that his lite was for
more than six weeks hanging in the bal
ancey Mr.. Balfour's agents rightly cal:
culate that If they can stop short of
actual shooting and killing the English
newspapers are too overcrowded and
the English public too busy to pay
much attention to the tedious annals of
fractures of the skull inflicted upon an
obscure Irish village crowd, who do not
strike back. The result is that the very
submissiveness which we have preached
to our people causes their sufferings to
pass unnotlced, and when Mr.. Balfour
brags Of the absence of
SENSATIONAL IRISH NEWS
from the newspapers, it is only Eng
lishmen like Mr.. Shaw Lefeyre and Mr..
Wilson and Mr., Rowntree, who go act
ually down among the people and study
their daily lives. who understand that
the scenes enacted in Tipperary last
week are enacted every week and almost
every day in some part of the country.
with the sole difference that Mr.. Dillon
is not there to be batoned, or English
newspaper correspondents to record the
demeanor OF his assallants. Within the
past ten days scores of cases Of police
violence quite as lnexcusable and as
brutal as those in Tipperary occurred
in my own constituency at Fermoy
(Cork county,, and at f0rtumna. in the
county of Galway; and it would be safe
tc assume that not one English news
paper reader in a thousand read even.
the names OF those localities in their
papers, although the report Of the two
powder squlbs tgrotesq uely described as
..explosives'') fired off by foolish school
boys in Tipperarv has literally re-
sounded through England. That is the
real cruelty Of the peoples situation in
lreland-t If they strike back, they
are miscreants, and il they endure in
silence 1t is taken for granted that they
have nothing very grievous to endure.
It is not at all sufn GENTLY apprehended
in Great Britain that Mr.. Balfour has.
effected q complete change of front
from tile original coercion policy which
he expounded to Mr.. Wilfred Blunt.
His first theory was that he had only to
strike down handful Of leaders to end
his difficulties. The first eighteen
months of the coercion act we're devoted
almost exclusively to pursuing a few
prominent men with penalties and deg
radatlons, and striking terror bY. bold.
sssr,s IN fif,yl III /, axsii an f1r