Mr. W. S. Caine, the Unionist M.P. for Barrow-in-Furness, has
written a letter stating that he cannot find language strong enough to express his horror of "the foul conspiracy to which Mr. Parnell has been subjected," or his opinion "of the conduct of the Times in lending itself to these famous libels on the flimsy evidence furnished to them of their sup- posed genuineness." "The only comment I will make on the charges in general is, that it appears to me that those charges which may be termed damaging to the personal honour or moral character are disproved, and that those relating to what may be termed political crime have been proved. On the whole, the Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament have come out of the inquiry much better than I expected, and I am heartily and ungrudgingly glad of it." That letter is conceived in a generous spirit, but we cannot go anything like the same length. We do think it damaging to the personal honour of a man to boast of having received in America "810 for bread and $20 for lead," and then to try to explain away the "$20 for lead" as a subscription to the Land League. We do think it damaging to the personal honour of a man to have sworn that he probably intended to mislead the House of Commons. And we do think it damaging to the moral character of a group of men to have been proved to have set in motion an "all-pervading tyranny" which resulted in a great flood of crime, of the consequences of which they availed themselves freely while professing no sympathy with it. Political revolt in which men risk their own lives we can regard without disgust, though we would have the State sternly punish and repress it. But a conspiracy to render men, women, and children miserable for paying their just debts and earning honestly their own livelihood, or attending the school chosen for them by their parents, seems to us, and has always seemed, a base and malignant conspiracy that has no right to be termed in any apologetic sense " political " at all.
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