The Potteries Examiner : — 1880-01-10 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

IRISH DISTRISS AND IRISH DISORDER. Tim Irish Relief Fund, which the Lord Mayor of London, at the urgent request of the Duchess of Marlborough, opened at the Mansion House, does not appear to have made much headway since it was started a week or two ago. This is not to be wondered at considlering that the inevitable results of the anti-rent agitation, recklessly begun by Mr. Parnell and his friends of the Home Rule faction, are developing themselves now in scenes of lawlessness, disurder, and bloodshed. The people of England and Scotland are well enough aware that very great distress, needing to be relieved, exists in those parts of Ireland which were specially brought under public, notice by the philanthropic wife of the Viceroy; but they also feel that the present painful state of affairs has been greatly aggravated by the agitators who, pretending to be warm patriots, incite their countrymen, wheo starvation is staring many of them in the face, to the very brink of sedition. The troubles in which the Irish farmers, great and small, find themselves involved, arise mainly from the same MIMICS as those that have induced numbers of English and Scotch agriculturists to emigrate to Minnesota and Manitoba, and yet the fernier have been led to believe, by outpourings of pernicious talk, that the British Government is to blame for all the evils they endure,' the greatest of these evils being the paymerd of rent by tenants to landlords. If Mr. Parnell;had advised the unfortunate farmers, who were foolish enough to give heed to his socialistic or nihilistic doctrines, to pay what they could of their rent, and trust to the generality of their landlords for the remission of the remainder, he would have shown himself to be a patriot anda man of sense; ea it was, he only augmented the evils for which he pretended to have found a panacea, and left his countrymen to their fate, in order tlmt he might try and make some political capital, of which he stood much in need, by stumping the United States, where he knew that he would be sure of a welcome from Fenian sympathisers with Irish dile loyalty and discontent. Since going to America he has declared, in answer' to some strictures in New York papers on the Mischievous character of the agitation he started in Ireland, that he has been grievously misapprehended, and that the struggle to get back thelland to the landless was designed from the beginning to be a moral movement, contemplating no resort to physical violence. Did not Mr. Parnell, before he crossed the Atlantic, give the emphatic advice, over and over again, at excited meetings, to pay no rent, though tenants had incurred their liabilities and responsibilities by taking farms, and how was that advice to be acted upon with effect except by resorting to violence? Mr. Parnell may prate as he likes about seeking to gain the end in view solely through the pressure of legitimate influences. He knew well enough the excitable nature of the people to whom he delivered his inflammatory harangues, and he , must be held morally responsible for the murderous threats and actual agrarian murders, for the resistance to authority, outrages and violences which have thrown Ireland quarter of a century back within two or three months. The attack made in Connemara by a party of four or five hundred peasantry upon the constabulary force who were protecting process. servers may be regarded as the natural outcome of the wild talk in which Mr. Parnell and his associates chose to indulge. The mission of the latest Irish agitator to America has teen undertaken for the twofold purpose of raising funds to relieve Irish distress, and of gaining the moral support of the United States to the land movement. But what necessity was there for going a-begging to America before the thousands of Irish people in English and Scottish towns had been appealed to on behalf of their countrymen in distress at home? The Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Viceroy, has proved to be a better and kinder friend to Mr. Parnell's distressed compatriots than Mr. Parnell himself, with all his professions of devotion to Ireland. As to the land movement, all that need be said is that when it is pot into a shape that commends it to the common sense and sense of justice of Englishmen it will not require any moral support from America to make it prove a success.  MR. HENRY BROADHURST rERSUS