The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1849-10-16 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

DISMISSAL OF LORD RODEN.—LORD CLARENDON'S LETTER.—The phraseology of the letter is remarkable. By no slip of pen or memory does it happen throughout the entire letter that the body who walked in procession are called " Protestants," the " Protestant party," or any otherwise than " the Orange party." A designation which slander has not been spared to render odious, which is not applicable here either, because it is in proof that many of those who attended the procession were not Orangemen, and never had been so ; but which, at the same time. we are far from objecting to, inasmuch as every good Protestant, whether initiated or not, is, of necessity, an Orangeman in spirit. But we do object to the Lord Lieutenant's description of the assassins who waylaid the loyal Protestants with intent to,murder them. It is not that he avoids calling them by their proper name. That was not to have been expected. He does not even venture to call them as they are styled in their own journals " the Ribbon party"—nay. he shrinks from styling them even as the " Roman Catholic" party. His Excellency blandly terms them the " Catholic" party. When his Excellency, therefore, prays for " the holy Catholic Church," it seems, lie prays for the Church of the Pope and cardinals of Rome, as contradistinguished from that pure and scriptural Church of which he is himself an unworthy member. It is not enough that the Queen's commission is placed at the disposal of the priests—must the Queen's English, too, be mauled and abused to gratify their bigotted pretensions ? But he abuses language to other purposes. With a small cunning, which he no doubt thinks vastly clever, and which will render the substantial injustice of the proceeding still more odious, he labours to reduce by a systematic petitio principii, the loyal Orangemen and the assassins who conspired to murder them in cold blood, to a moral and legal level. They are studiously placed in the same category as " these armed bodies," and " bodies dangerous to the public peace"—a tendency attributed by his Excellency to the Orange procession, not only without evidence to support it, but in the very teeth of the evidence actually taken before the magistrates, and as his Excellency conveys, carefully perused and considered by himself. The Lord Lieutenant, too, persists in calling the line of road by Dolly's Brae, " the disputed road," a phrase intended like others employed in this statesmanlike performance, to reduce the Orangemen and the Ribbonmen to the same level. Now the Orangemen " disputed" nothing; they simply asserted their undoubted right to walk upon the Queen's highway. They asserted precisely the same right which Lord Clarendon exercised, when in the acme of his unpopularity, surrounded by his plumed staff, and followed by his dragoons, he rode into the Phoenix Park to celebrate an English victory, upon the very day on which he transported John Mitchell. Had a mob of insulted Dublin clubbists, led by Messrs. Duffy, M`Gee, Ryan Puck, &c., and comforted by Fathers Kenyon and Laffan, occupied the passage from the viceregal grounds into the Park, it would have been in precisely the same sense " the disputed road ;" and conscientious Mr. Berwick must have pronounced his Excellency's gaudier cortege upon precisely the same principle " an unlawful procession," have placed him and his companions upon precisely the same legal footing as the aforesaid Duffy, M'Gee, and Ryan Puck, and demanded informations (notwithstanding the evidence) against the gentlemen who took part at the " English" side and against the " Catholic party" in a demonstration so perilous to the public peace. Nay, the upright Mr. Berwick must have done more. The attempt to assassinate his Excellency having failed, and the " Catholic party" having been dispersed by the dragoons, he must have protected the aforementioned priests, Laffan and Kenyon, when pressed to identify the rifle clubmen, with whom they had associated themselves, against so unreasonable an invasion of the priestly prerogative. He must have said, " under all the circumstances, I would strongly urge your not pressing the rev. gentlemen, who were there, of course, in their clerical capacity, for an answer to such a question."— Dublin Herald.