IRISH AFFAIRS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2181, 28 March 1891, Page 1

IRISH AFFAIRS.

Loudon, March 24. Messrs Dillon and O’Brien have been removed to the gaol at Cork to give evidence in the cases arising out of the Tipperary riot. Ihere is great excitement in Cork at their arrival. March 25. The Pope, in the course of an interview with the Archbishop of Dublin, advised (ha Irish clergy to maintain opposition to Mr Parnell, Mr Parnell declines Mr Healey’s challenge to resign on the ground that he fears bis opponents intend to circumvent him by underhand means. Mr Parnell asserts that Maurice Healey is in collusion with the Unionists to defeat him at Cork, The Times in referring to Mr Parnell’s refusal to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, considers be is seeking to shuffle out of a contest with Healey,

LONDON CARD SCANDAL,

Writing on January 28th the London correspondent of The Argus says:— Society is convulsed by a card scandal—the Prince of Wales, it is alleged, having detected a young guardsman, Sir William G-ordon-Cumming, in the act of cheating. The young man, who bad been hitherto one of the darlings of society, and was always named as a man sure to marry a girl of the first distinction, got to the end of his fortune some time ago, and it is asserted that as a means of replenishing his bank account he resorted to. the expedient of carelessly placing a highly polished silver cigar-case on his lap while he was dealing—the burnished surface reflecting each card as he dealt it. Writing a week later the correspondent adds: — The great card-playing scandal, of which I wrote last week, is still agitating society. The affair happened as long ago as last Doncaster Races, and was supposed to have been finally settled by the exaction from the alleged delinquent of a paper promising under his hand never to touch a card again. Upon this undertaking it was agreed by the dozen men who were cognisant of the matter that it should be buried for ever in silence; and it is added that therefore those who were charged with the custody of the precious renunciation were simple enough to destroy it! It would have been well if the parties to the affair had not been saturated with the ecclesiastical axiom that man and wife are one flesh, for each regarded it as consistent with their mutual promises of silence to tell the whole stery to his wife, and as soon as the ladies were driven to town by the long frost,their tongues began-a-wagging; and then society was in an uproar. At present the alleged delinquent is showing plenty of fight, and as one way of protesting his innocence contrived to figure prominently at the first night of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s opera. It is uncertain whether his defence is to be rested open an allegation that he never signed the paper at all, or that his signature was obtained by duress; but, in any case he seems minded like the blind Samson, to pull down the pillars of the royal banqueting house and involve all the courtiers in one common ruin. It is remarked by those who are expert in the almost extinct art of hushing up scandals that, they who took upon themselves the burial of this one departed from the tradition of the elders in not requiring the delinquent to resign his position and his clubs. Those terms were always de rigeur in the old day, as, for instance, in the case of Corrie Oonnellan, immortalised in Thackeray’s ballad, whose case was adjudicated upon by those past masters of etiquette the late Lord Torrington and Abraham Hayward. The adjudicators in . the present case had no right, it is cunningly argued, to allow the man to remain a member of polite society on the faith of a bare promise, which they must have assumed him capable of breaking, and which he might have broken every week, in the year for anything they might ever hear of it.