A Campaign of Calumny

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 25, 22 June 1905, Page 2

A Campaign of Calumny

In his ' Paradise Lost,' Milton makes Lucifer say, after ha\ing sounded the devouring depths of flame .— ' So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse : all good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good.' According to Mr. Moore a little more leavening of evil, a few more doses of original sin, sundry further whiffs of the moral principles of the Abyss, would prove an enormous ' good ' fot Ireland. For has he not, in a recent an 3 somewhat unsavory book, endeavored to make it appear that virtue is the blighting curse of that old Catholic land ? Prisons are "being steadily closed there ; white gtloves, the emblems of the total absence of crime, are (as our news columns show) presented to judges at assizes alter assizes in a great number of the counties ; and during the past year mo fewer than one hundred ami eight police stations were closed throughout the country. ' The only counTies,' says an esteemed contemporary, ' in which no reductions of the constabulary ha\e taken place are Derry, Antrim, and Down.' And there, it is the excessive ' playfulness ' of tne festive Orange brethren that furnishes a scope for the operations of the armed and semi-military police of Ireland. • The Howard Association is one of the most useful philanthropic societies in Great Britain, It is named after the great prison reformer, John Howard, and was founded two 'generations ago, under the patronage of Lord Brougham, ■' for tne promotion of the best methods for the treatment and prevention of crime, pauperism, etc' In its report for 1903, the Association has the following interesting information in the paragraph which appears uinder the heading, ' Visits to Prisons . Ireland' — ' Two visits to Ireland have 'lieen paid during the year, the secretary having been gratified to note how large a part of the country is almost crfmeless. A visit to the convict prison for women at Mountjoy (Dublin) revealed the surprising fact that the total number of women (^miin Ireland at that time was fifteen.'

This inconvenient freedom of ' Banba of tne streams ' from serious crime is a sore affliction to the Orange and Coercionist pressmen and politicians. It gives them occasional spasms of acute indignation and compels them, Th order to serve their party ends, to resort to some of the ungentlest arts of the professional calumniator. For some weeks past they have been working

overtime, and on a full head of steam* at the manufacture of bogus •« outrages,' in order to create a pretext for another regime of Coercion. Some samples of these have been referred to by us in a recent issue. Here is one of the latest— in its way a gem of purest ray serene. It adorned the columns of an Ulster Orange paper, and was sent (or at least purported to have been sent) from Camolin, in the peaceful Model County of Wexford":— ' An inoffensive Protestant named Johnson was waylaid on the road between this town and Ballycanew yesterday evening by seven priests and a masked man who is believed to ibe a Roman Cardinal sent over to pror mote the welfare of the Catholic Church. They stripped the poor Protestant naked, tied him to a tree, flogged him until his ribs protruded, and then fixed an infernal contrivance of pitch, tow, and gunpowder on his head. Having set fire to it, the fiends chanted hymns in Latin until the victim died. Then they cut off his charred head and made a football of it. In this brutal pasrtime they were joined by two Roman Catholic policemen from the neighboring barrack. General satisfaction is expressed at the action of the priests, and it is said all will soon be promoted to parishes.'

The audacity of this story Is simply staggering. We are well acquainted with priests and people in the district referred to a"bove. And we were therefore fully prepared to learn, from the columns of the county paper that circulates tnere, that investigation proved the story to be, through a^nd through, a malicious calumny, devoid of the faintest shadow of foundation. But as the tale is likely to be repeated In one or other of the few New Zealand papers that like that sort of thing, our readers would do well to cut these paragraphs out, or, like Captain Outtle, to make a note of them.