Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, December 31, 1867

Clerkenwell.

The world is so full of folly that we ought scarcely to be surprised at any exhibition of a lack of common sense in the multitude; yet the course which the Fenians seem to have resolved upon following in England is so preposterously foolish that one can hardly help suspecting it must have been inspired by some of their secret enemies. The folly of the British Government in hanging the three Irishmen at Manchester, by way of warning the conspirators to rescue no more prisoners, has been exceeded by the folly of the Fenians who blew up the Clerkenwell jail and destroyed a number of lives, by way of protesting that the warning was lost upon them. We have expressed our conviction more than once that the worst thing at present to be apprehended from the Fenian movement is the kindling of a riotous animosity between Celtic and Saxon mobs in the English cities and towns. Both parties seem now to be trying their best to precipitate this apprehended disaster. The Government has entered upon a course of ill-judged rigor; the press has been holding up the halter as the great national panacea; and now the Fenians have allowed themselves to be provoked into outrages which, if they are not stopped at once, will render it literally impossible for the Crown not to hang, or for the English people not to hate them. The British bull-dog is a very savage and brutal creature when he is roused, and if he persuades himself that his house is to be blown up with gunpowder, Ireland may be turned into a second India or Jamaica. The men who tied Sepoys to the cannon's mouth, and justified the murders of Eyre, will have little compunction about a massacre of Irish insurgents.

But more than this, the Fenians are losing the countenance of their best friends. The spectacle of an oppressed people struggling manfully against their oppressors, falling or conquering in honest fight, striking at their enemies, and sparing the guiltless, cannot but awaken enthusiasm in all honorable breasts. But the incendiary and the assassin is every man's foe. No cause, however holy, can justify a deed like that at Clerkenwell, which brought death and suffering upon the harmless, and in no event could have been any serious advantage to the Irish people. By the execution of Allen and his companions, Fenianism made a tremendous gain; by this affair, it has suffered a tremendous loss.—N. Y. Tribune.