The Sun. — 1837-10-07 (London, England)

FABRICATED OUTRAGES.—The contemporary whom we have just quoted has an able article on the subject of manufacturing reports of outrages that have never occurred. The following is a short summary of the just and excellent observations on the discreditable Tory practice deprecated by the Dublin Evening Post, in common with every honest man in the kingdom :—The discovery and committal of the Sligo Orange conspirators who were employed in swearing the peasantry not to work for Protestants, with the viow of supplying pabulum to the Orange press, is, of itself, quite sufficient to expose the atrocity of the " State-of-the-country" system, which has been in more active operation than ever during the last three months. That fiendish plot discloses a new and horrible feature in the tactics of the faction. Heretofore the Orange scribes contented themselves with fabricating murders and outrages ; but now they endeavour to promote their objects by the actual preparation of crime. A hundred times, at least, we have exposed those fabricators, and convicted them of deliberate falsehoods, in cases where they had given circumstantial details of acts of violence, and even of murders, which never had been committed. A paper called The Ballyshannon Herald has recently become one of the most reckless of the fabricators. Some days ago it asserted, on the pretended authority of Mr. R. Blake, stipendiary magistrate, that an illegal society existed in Ballyshannon. This statement was placarded as a proofof Ribbonism, andso forth, in the English and Irish Tory organs. Mr. Blake has published a denial ; but although the falsehood has gone the rontals, the contradiction will, probably, never be noticed. Mr. Blake, in a letter to the Ballyshannon fabricator, states that he never gave any authority for such a statement. The Dublin Gazette is constantly appealed to as an authority for the prevalence of outrage, because proclamations offering rewards for the apprehension of offenders appear in that paper. But, strange to say, the Government is assailed by the Tory organs for winking at the commission of outrage, whilst the rewards offered for the detection of effenders are pointed to as a proof of disturbance. This is, to be sure, extremely absurd, but not a whit more so than every other mode of assailment resorted to by the faction. The Gazette certainly proves the vigilance of the Government, and its determination to punish the violators of the law ; but looking at the amount of crime recorded in the Gazette, and even taking it for granted that all the outrages manufactured by the Orange provincial journals had actually been perpetrated, although three-fourths of them are invented, and all are grossly exaggerated, would Ireland, after all, with her impoverished population, be more disturbed than happy and prosperous England ? The outragemongers must employ more active agents—fellows with more fertile imaginations, before they can succeed in representing Ireland to be more disturbed than England. We would undertake to produce, froM the English provincial journals of any one week, a greater amount of crime actually committed—we say actually, for in England there are no outrage manufacturers—than has been collected in a similar period during the existence of the present Government, from the Irish provincial fabricators, the Wexford Conservative and all. Such is the unprecedented state of tranquillity in this country at present, that the wretches employed to manufacture crimes have comparatively little scope for their operations ; and, besides, the people are beginning to have a sharp look-out after their falsehoods and exaggerations. We do not say that Ireland isOlree from crimes ordinarily perpetrated in any country ; but what we contend is that, taking into account the privations of our closely-packed population, and their numerous provocations, that there is comparatively little crime, and that the habits of order are daily becoming more prevalent. But even the Dublin Gazette, in which the Government acting upon representations from local authorities, causes Proclamations offering rewards to be inserted, may sometimes be made the means of misrepresenting the state of the country.