Yankee recruiting in Ireland.
From the intercepted letter of
Mr. De Leon, which the
Yankees published, we learn that that interesting nation have been recruiting in
Ireland at a great rate.
During the current year they have been able to procure twenty thousand recruits only, leaving it to be inferred that in former years their success had been much greater.
These proceedings are perfectly well known to the
Palmerston Ministry--
Mr. De Leon had a conversation regarding them with the
Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland — many attempts have been made, we are told, to stop them, but without effect.
Russell finds that the foreign enlistment law is not sufficiently comprehensive to embrace them.
Were the party engaged in them the Confederate Government, no doubt it could be stretched so as to catch the delinquents; or, If that failed,
Russell would "go down to Parliament," as the phrase is, with a law sufficiently broad and long to secure the culprits, as in a net. But they happen to be Yankees, and to interfere with them in the prosecution of their upright designs would be to wound the susceptibilities of
Secretary Seward.
Anything rather than that.
Submission, humiliation, a total surrender of British policy into the hands of
Adams, rather than encounter that terrible misfortune.
Neutrality, Vattel tells us, consists in rendering no assistance of any kind to either belligerent party.
The British Government is neutral after a fashion.
It certainly renders no direct assistance to the
Yankees by sending them recruits.
It contents itself with merely permitting them to recruit on their own account.
It does nothing more than throw the door open; they walk in and help themselves.
The
Irish have been filling the world with their complaints, of English tyranny ever since the days of Strong-bow and his land thieves.
Persecution, it has been said, never begets charity.
It must be true.
How else can we account for the astonishing zeal with which the persecuted
Irish unite in assisting the
Yankees to fasten the fetters upon the limbs of men as well entitled to be free as themselves?
to crush the last remnant of freedom upon this continent as it has already been crushed in their own country?
to side with the oppressor against the oppressed?
with those who, on a former occasion, proscribed them and their religion, against those who stood side by side with them in defence of both?--Nothing has ever astonished us so much as the part, in this struggle, taken by the large majority of the Irish people; and though we have among us many brave sons of Erin who are prepared to shed their life's blood in defence of our and their cause, yet they seem to be the exception to a rule as general as it is, to us, unintelligible.
But there can be no excuse for the
British Government in this matter.
but a few years ago the whole world rang with their outcries against the filibusters that were assailing the various portions of what was once known as the
Spanish Empire.
There was no epithet which wrath and jealousy could invent that was not applied to that description of enterprise.
If the United States Government, their journals hesitated not to say, could not put a stop to it, the whole world ought to unite and take the matter into their own hands.--But neither the filibustering enterprises, nor any others, since the great
North poured its barbarians upon the provinces of the
Roman Empire, ever presented a spectacle worthy to be named on the same day with that which is this day presented in
Ireland.
The
United States sent out their filibusters by hundreds — these recruits from
Ireland are reckoned by scores of thousands.
And the
British Government, which can find an apology in its pharisaical profession of neutrality for stopping a few Confederate steamers, can find no means to put an end to such an exodus as this!
