The condemned Fenian Burke is reprieved, and we are to
have no Fenian executions. This is well, but Lord Derby's Cabinet showed its usual want of judgment in deciding on the execution of Burke, rejecting the plea for mercy urged on the Queen's birth- day to the Lord-Lieutenant in Dublin, and then at last yielding, against what it had asserted to be its own judgment, to the repre- sentations of the English parliamentary deputation, headed by Mr. Dodson last Saturday. No Government was ever equal to this for boasting strong things and doing weak ones. We do ant mean that it was weak to give way at last, about Burke. It would have been weaker far to insist on outraging the feeling both of England and Ireland. But it was very weak to suppose that a great example would extinguish treason in Ireland, when already in Canada,—in the case of a raid far more utterly inexcusable,— a raid on peaceful citizens who had no more connection with the wrongs of Ireland than the wrongs of Mexico,—we had yielded to the representations of our great neighbour, the United States, and spared all the lives forfeited. Everybody must have said that we were taking the lives of the less guilty, when we had spared the more guilty out of fear of America. How would that have tended to pacify Ireland ?
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