On Tuesday, Mr. William O'Brien addressed a meeting of Welsh
Liberals at Blaenau Festiniog. Commenting on Mr. Balfour's speech, he asked whether the Chief Secretary had told his audience of the population decreasing by sixty thousand a year, of the three thousand of the most respected citizens who had been persecuted under his warrant, or of the tens of thousands of poor Irish families lying under sentence of eviction. _Mr. Balfour had no more sympathy for the sufferings he had inflicted than the vivisectionist, but the comparison was unfair to the vivisectionist. In this vein the speech proceeded, defamatory epithets being piled one on the other in the style with which the public are familiar enough through extracts from United Ireland. The Welsh Gladstonia.ns are fond of strongly spiced rhetoric, and they no doubt felt themselves greatly refreshed by the hubbub of vituperation to which Mr. O'Brien treated them,—especially, too, since they were entirely unable to check his facts and figures. From what source, we wonder, does Mr. O'Brien get his three thousand of the most respected men in Ireland ? Unless he reckons in the men who boycotted Norah Fitt- maurice and shot her father, the murderers of Patrick Qnirke, and such criminals as the men who drenched a cow with paraffin and then set fire to her, or blew off a feeble old man's foot with a shot-gun, he will find it hard, we should imagine, to verify his statement. Are these, in his judgment, re- spectable?
Previous page
