The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1881.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4044, 14 December 1881, Page 2

The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1881.

Owe of the roost singular telegrams we bare had from Great Britain for many a day is that to the following effect:— "The Lord Mayor of London invites national subscriptions to assist in the defence of property in Ireland." Without saying that Hi* Lordship mistakes his functions, or that the English Government is remiss in its duty towards civil life and its conditions in Ireland, let us for a moment glance at some of the attempts made to preserve property in Ireland since the union. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1800, from 1802 till 1805, from 1807 till 1810, in 1811, and from 1822 till 1824. Then came the Arms Bill of 1830, denounced as vexatious and oppressive by the Lords; Lord Stanley's Arms Act in 1831; Lord John JRussell's Bill, passed on a Sunday in 1848, and the various edicts for repression and coercion from that time to the present is familiar to the minds of middle aged men. When one recollects all these attempts to preserve property, and the action of the Lord Mayor of London at the present time, the forcible words of Mr John Bright on this subject (before, however, he was a Minister of the Crown) seem appropriate for quotation. He said "it was in the external decrees of Providence that so long as the population of a country were prevented from the possibility of possessing any portion of their native soil by legal enactments, and legal chicanery, these outrages would be committed, were they but as beacons and warnings to call the Legislature to a sense of the duties it owed to the country which is governed." What seems strange to our mind is that a public man like the Lord Mayor of the centra of the Empire cannot see that the- time has come when repression no longer is a cure for Irish discontent. Mr Justin McCarthy, writing on this subject in his lately published and clever " History of our Times," says:—"The impatient and silly nurse tries to stop the child's crying by beating it; a more careful and intel ligent person makes a prompt investigation, and finds that a pin is sticking into the little sufferer. The English Government has been for a long lime the stupid nurse to the crying child. They had tried threatening words and quick blows. The cry of complaint is still heard." What tbe Lord Mayor wants to aid in doing is to tell the nurse to remove the pins which make her cherub continually to cry. A great many people forget that labor is property as well as material wealth, and that with a broader and deeper significance.