The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1892-07-30
Poisoning the Wells.
o the Editor OF The Irish Standard.

For some time past the newspaper
reading public has been almost daily
RECALLED by accounts of riotous proceed
ings in Ireland, of public meetings being
broken up, of contending factions assall-
ing each other with stones and bricks,
of speakers being rotten-egged and hus-
tied off platforms, of priests welding
blackthorns, and laymen laying violent
hands upon priests, and SO on with the
catalogue of rowdyism, as if the whole
island we're a scene of uproar and con-
fict, a veritable 'Donny brook Fail" "
whore the old charge "wherever you see
a head, hit it, was the INSPIRING i'm
pulse of every one. These reports have
been dinned so increasingly into the ears
of the public as to give rise to the inn
preston that there cannot be a meeting
without there being row, and that the
only kind of logic that prevails is the ar
gumentum baculinum. Now, those un-
acquainted with the social condition Of
Ireland, the characteristics of it's people,
and the system Of lying and defamation
that has been pursued by the English
press in regard to it, have no suspicion
that those reports are untrue, and in
wardly conclude that the Irish are a bad
lot, and deserve to be vigorously dealt
with; but those acquainted with the real
state of the case know that they are
nothing but the base concoctions of Ire
lands old enemy, the Sassenach, designed
to bring the noble cause of Irish indie
pendence into odium and contempt, to
delude the electors of Great Britain, and
ALLEVIATE the sympathy of Americans and
other liberty-loving people. Some re-
ports there were, indeed, in which there
was q modicum of truth, but truth SO
violently distorted and exaggerated as
to be more fttingly characterised by the
name of falsehood, But by. far the
greater number of them were fa5rica~
tions pure and simple, as utterly without
foundation in fact as the ''ba seless fabric
of vision
The Pioneer Press, a short tina ago.
told the truth unconsciously regarding
one Of these reports which it headed as
"the same old story" 1t was, indeed,
the Same old story, the fabrica.
tors, either becoming careless, like all
old evil-doers who have carried on their
mal-practices successfully, or, thinking
that having gulled the public so long it
woul! now swallow almost anything,
having made the same report serve for
two occasions.
In ancient times the diabolical expe-
dent Of poisoning the wells before an
advancing enemy who could not be en-
countered in the open field, or by any OF
the means of honorable warfare, was
sometimes resorted to. But, even in
those benighted times, the expedient was
and to-day it's perpetrators
would DO held up to universal execration,
And yet, in this, the last decade of the
century, we have powerful
nation, nation which poses as being in
the vanguard of civilization and philan-
tropy, having recourse to tactics equally
abominable. For what can b9 deserving
Of greater adherence, and more calcu-
lated to arouse the honest indignation of
intelligent beings than the poisoning of
the fountains of truth and knowledge,
whence they derive their information.
That is what the English government,
10y its hirelings and adherents and the
horde of bloodsuckers which it's pestifer-
GUS influence has generated, is doing in
regard to Ireland After seven hundred
years of abortive government, after pub
ting in operation all the nefarious ma
chinery which its nefarious ministers
could devise in the shape Of penal laws,
coercion acts, and crimes acts without
number, with their inevitable concom-
itants, the dungeon, the rack and the
scaffold, and having failed by these means
to make the people submissive to the
yoke, having been forced to surrender
all its outposts, and being driven to it's
last ditch by the force of events and the
onward march of the people rightly
struggling to be- free" it now has re-
course to the insidious tactics of the
moral thug and assassin by holding up
the Irish people before the world as lot
of arrant brawlers, destitute alike Of rea-
son and sense, and unfit and unworthy
to be trusted with the right, which is
theirs by the law of nature and of ma
lures God, the right to make their own
laws upon their own soil. The result of
the last general election, however, gives
the lie direct to all these foul reports. It
shows that the Irish people are practi-
cally unit in sentiment and opinion, and
completely vindicates them from all the
calumnies and aspersions of their malig-
nant traducers. But, putting aside this
fact, though it is powerful and conclu-
sive enough to disabuse the mind of any
sane man of the idea of there being any