§ MR. BAILLIE COCHRANEwished to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary for Ireland whether his attention had been called to the following paragraph, which appeared in the last number of the Nation newspaper, published in that country, and, if so, whether it was the intention of the Government to proceed against the editor of that paper? The paragraph was this:—
Ireland's necessity demands the desperate remedy of revolution—it demands, and will justify before God and all men really made in His image, this last resource of nations long oppressed. A revolution means a peaceful or a violent uprooting of a Government, or an upsetting of society; its business is to cure the evils it cannot endure—to cure them with as little loss of blood and time as the means of the revolutionists and the nature of the opposition against them may allow. The Continental nations all had their grievances; but ours are immeasurably greater—they sought the right of meeting, but we seek the right of existence—they sought liberty of the press, but we seek liberty to live—the real alternative with Ireland is decimation or revolution. It is evident to all men that our foreign Government is but a club of gravediggers; they foster poverty and protect pestilence; fever, taxation, exile, death, all arise from their felonious taking away of our means of life; we are decimated not by the will of God, but by the will of the Whigs; obedience to a Government which rules to rob and legislates to destroy is a high crime—alliance with it is a conspiracy against the nation—votes of confidence in such Governments are death warrants—keeping order for them is doing undertakers' work—aiding them in the administration of the law is finishing off without accusation or trial fresh myriads of our doomed population.Mr. Duffy, who was the editor of that paper, was guilty, he thought, of holding most treasonable language in that paragraph.
§ SIR W. SOMERVILLEhad not seen 1257 the extract to which the hon. Member referred, and the hon. Member's perusal of it was the first notice of it which he had received; but he had been for some time in the habit of reading in productions from Ireland language equally extravagant. Of course he was not able to state what the intention of the Government with respect to the paragraph in question was; but no doubt the attention of the Lord Lieutenant had been called to it: he believed everything would be left in his hands, and that he would take such steps respecting it as he thought proper.