O'DONOVAN ROSSA Murdered.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 88, 7 February 1885, Page 3

O' DONOVAN ROSSA Murdered.

Additional precautions are being taken in London against the perpetration of further dynamite outrages, and meanwhile the arch conspirator, who is believed to have been the chief organiser and director of former fiendish attempts, has been the object of murderous assault in New York. It may be said that there is a fitness in the shocking occurrence ; they that live by assassination may justly perish by the same means ; and the recent murder of an Irish conspirator in O'Donovan Rossa's office is not the only instance in which sudden and secret death has been the reward of treachery, real or imagined. In this case, it would seem that O'Donovan Rossa has fallen, not before the just wrath of an Englishman, but before the avengii«g arm of an indignant country - woman who conceived him to be lax in his execution of vengeance on England. Such, at any rate, is the dying man's own statement — that the woman who assaulted him upbraided him for not having caused more deaths in England, and in fury at his presumed breach of promise, shot and wounded him mortally. We are glad that the crime does not lie, as at first reported, at the door of any Englishman, however justly enraged at the horrible and murderous plots of O'Donovan Ilossa ; and though it is regrettable that anyone should outrage law and order, even for the removal of a social pest, there is a savour of poetic justice in the removal being effected by one of his dupes, whose eyes had at last been opened to the hollow swash - bucklerism of his grandiloquent threats of dire execution against '* the Saxon. For many years, Rossa and men of his ilk have been living sumptuously on the money freely contributed by thousands of industrious but misguided men and women in America, who dreamed that he was to be the instrument of Ireland's regeneration. It is too much to expect that with him will expire the race of venal " patriots " who are the curse of Ireland and the scourge of Britain : but his fate may warn his fellowconspirators that no matter how cleverly they may elude the law, the reward of their misdeeds will overtake them in some shape. Rossa's death by the hand of an Englishman would have added fuel to the fire of Irish hatred, and augmented the crop of outrages ; his assassination by a disappointed compatriot will do more thin all legislative action, conciliatory or restrictive, to turn Irishmen from schemes of aimless retaliation to honest and constitutional means of reform.