The Irish standard., 1910-05-07
BITTER MEMORIES
ARE NOW REVIVED
By a Revelation Made in
a British Magazine by a
Retired Detective.
Confesses to Have Written
Forged Letters Against
the Nationalist.
Ireland Then Administered
Under Reign of Terror by
Bloody Balfour."

Two very exciting questions are now
of Commons, of Ireland in particular,
and the people of these islands in gen.
eral. Irish politics seem to be more
emotional than the cold business prop
ositions attributed to Englishmen.
That Englishmen have in the House
of Commons displayed any aptitude
enough to maintain, for whereas
duty has lain before them plain as
pike staff, the Liberal leaders have
for weeks been treating us to vapid
constitutional disquisitions, writes Col.
Arthur Lynch, M. p. in the st. Louis
Republic.
With the Irish, and in all affairs re-
lating to Ireland, we come into a diff
ferent atmosphere-an atmosphere
more charged with electricity, more
tropical, more stormy. All this must
at base be due to something tempera-
mental.
i First, with regard to William
O'Brien. That gentleman has been in
dulging in some great tomahawk-
throwing. From recent speech of
his at Cork Gull a few flowers of
rhetoric. He speaks of John Dillon,
Tol,, =,
dedicated his book, when We Were
Boys" in these terms: "Unfathomably
beneath contempt" "Degenerated from
all the decencies," Makes an appeal
to the lowest instincts of the lowest
creatures and "Loathsome vulgarity."
All this in the first paragraph.
Would that It were possible to con-
duct our affairs without these accom-
paniments. I am reminded Of an old
Fenian friend, the late John OLeary.
He had a long patriarchal beard, a
bright eye, a keen, critical faculty and
occasionally when one Of the COM
pany was propounding political Wild
cat scheme, John O'Leary would wait
till he had finished and then, with his
eyes as sharp as gimlets and with a
high pitched voice, he would break
in: "But in the name of Heaven, what
good will all that do to Ireland?"
And reading of these denunciations
I say in turn: "What good will that
do to Ireland?"
1t may well be asked what good can
mutual recriminations at any time do
for Ireland. At the present moment,
when by virtue of the evenly matched
forces of the English parties, Ireland
! has the balance of power, it is espe-
cially unfortunate that the strength Of
the Irish party should be diminished
by these internal quarrels and the
spectacle they afford to the enemy.
That Ireland has quite enough on
; her shoulders in making Roadway
against external obstacles has been
made abundantly clear by the revela-
tons of Sir Robert Anderson dis
cussed this week in the House of Com
mons. These refer to matters that
happened twenty years ago, but the
principle that inspired them remains
active today.
Briefly, the history is this: During
the height of ParnelPs power in Ire
land, and when it looked certain that
everything was tending to home rule,
series of articles appeared in The
London Times under the heading
"Parnellism and Crime These ar
ticles were written with manifest ven-
ON and party spirit, but they were
also written with the power of one
who knew, who could "dot the rs" and
who could quote chapter and verse for
what he said, even when his view was
most distorted. The articles reached
their elimination when Parnell was
accused of encouraging, or at least APP
proving, of the assassination of Lord
Frederick Cavendish and Mr.. Burke
j in Phoenix Park.
The charge was based on a letter
I alleged to have been written by Pam
t ell, but which was forged by certain
Piggott, whose education was al