The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1920-06-19
IRISH REPUBLIC
 IS DISPENSING ITS OWN JUSTICE
Land Evil Is Vigorously Combatted By Sim Fein
 Courts.
Tangled Questions of
 Ownership Settled
Decisions of Court Have Been Treated With Con-
 tempt Only Once.

Washington, D. C., June 19.-The government of the Irish Republic is successfully settling the knotty prob lem of land distribution and at the same time preserving order by means of arbitration courts, according to the statement made public today by the Friends of Irish Freedom National Bureau of Information. The state ment is as follows:
 One of the most serious situations which the collapse of the British government in Ireland has left to be faced by the Irish Republic is the land famine created in rural districts by centuries of British misrule. During these centuries the British government has shown itself incapa- ble of solving the problem. With the retreat of the British agents of gov ernment to a few well-forufed strong holds and their final abandonment of any pretense of maintaining law and order administering justice throughout the great rural districts of Ireland, the government of the Irish Republic has undertaken the grave responsibility of bringing order out of chaos.
 The Manchester Guardian, one Of the most powerful of the liberal newspapers in England, has shown itself by no means ready to recognize the legitimacy of the Irish RepubIlT or of Ireland's claims to national in dependence. Therefore the following statement by special corresponde1I: of the Guardian who personally watched the routine activity of one of the land dispute arbitration courts deserves the careful attention of those who are anxious to receive authentic information of present-day conditions in Ireland and of the success with which the Republican government is now functioning It is to be re- gretted that such statements of fact as the following are not presented to the American public by the rec ognized international news agepc1es. A SIc!rI FEN LAND
 COURT IN SESSION Reproduced from Special Correspon-
 dence of the Manchester Guardian,
 Manchester, England.
 (From our Special Correspondent.)
 Galway, Friday,-There is no doubt that Sim Fein is in earnest in it's efforts to procure a land peace M the west. A prominent Sim FHeiner who sits as arbitrator in a Republi- can land court told me today that the work was being got through with very few cases of contlImacy or dis content. He paid a tribute to the Land Acts, but said that their prac- tical cessation during the war, which was accompanied by the cessation oI emigration, was a great disaster. There was no need, he claimed, for the emigrant ship once the rich lands of the mid-landS had been tackled, and though emigration had begun again no Irishman could or should accept that as a solution. Sim Fein as a party is strongly opposed to emigration.
 My informant did equal justice to the work of the Congested Districts Board, but said that the Board had also slackened it's activities during the war, and had not resumed. nor would it declare it's policy. At one time it proposed renewing its work, at another it urged that Ireland was too disturbed to allow of action. The Board had done a real service to Ire land, especially in Donegal, but the big estates which it took over just before the war had never been divided but had been handed over to stock masters. This had caused great bit terness and led to cattle driving and collaborating in several districts. It was to get the insurgent claims for a fair division that the Sim Fein courts had been created, and he claimed that they had proved a success. At any rate, they are pop ular, and in Galway city the court has to sit five nights a week, eager are the applicants for their cases to be heard. So far Galway has only had to deal with one case of contempt of the verdict =~-'-A- -a-
 The attempt to prejudice English opinion against any form of Irish self-government on the ground that Irishmen are naturally incapable of discipline and if left to themselves would turn the country over to v1o- lent anarchy is thoroughly unfair, yet it is hard to see what else can be the purpose of the frequent questions put by Irish Unionists in Parliament and of the official outrage" list sent daily to the press. There are scamps in any party, and in time of political turmoil and grave economic pressure scarnps will come to the surface of the cauldron, but every day my inn pressiop of the really great amount Of self-imposed discipline in this v1r- tually unpoliced country is strength ened and reafirmed.
 Galway, Sunday-By courtesy of the arbitrators, I have been allowed tc watch the proceedings of a Sim Fein land court. These courts have sprung up spontaneously on the west coast of Ireland, and have not as yet beer systematized and co-ordinated by the central Republican authority. They are the natural result of the strong common will for national independ ence and national responsibility coupled with the categorical lmpera' tive Divide! Divide"' which lant hunger brings to the lips of poor mer living on bog and rock. What are they, in fact, doing is to carry or locally and informally the excellen work of the Land Acts and the Con gested Districts Board, and to arrarg' for compulsory purchase on equitable terms where proved necessity de mands-that is to say, where tn, smaller holders are shown to b. definitely uneconomic. They do no finance the wouldbe peasant pur chaser-he must look to himself O to his friends or to land bank fo that-but they smooth out the intri cate tangles of ownership as best the. can in a common-sense way, relyini not upon a complete and formal cod of legal precedent, but upon consia erations of equity and of the norma