AN APPEAL TO JUSTICE

The tragedy at Lucan has given the Christian soul of the country a very shock. But it has served at the same time to show what a wonderful compound the said Christian soul is. The beauty of its moral sense speaks out in this case, hissing through the teeth of hideous passions — passions of national and sectarian hatred. That the murdered certainly and the murderers probably, were all born, if they did not live, within the Catholic Church, no one denies. But common humanity, horrified as it well may be by the crime in Biddulph, directs its horror as if outside the scope of common humanity, against one part of that whole — those of it who are Irish Catholics! Sensational stories of the murder are dished up in the morning papers, garnished with statements that the parties to it are Catholics, are Irish, are Tipperary-men; and that they have been brought up by mothers and fathers in a code of blood which, proper to Tipperary, to the Irish, to the Catholics, taunts young men with degeneracy because they have not "killed their man!" Hundreds of the Irish Catholics around Lucan are known to us to be law-abiding, God-fearing, men, to be as good citizens as any in this Province. Notwithstanding that in their midst such a gang of murderers as may be found to exist anywhere, has declared its existence in blood; we owe the masses of the Irish Catholics of Biddulph, sons of virtuous Tipperary as many of them are, the duty of protesting before the moral sense of the country against the licentiousness which panders to national and sectarian antipathies by making them appear to be a population of Thugs.

The shocking story of Biddulph is not new in the history of crime. In England and in Scotland such things have taken place within the records of the criminal Courts. In Kentucky, not to say in other States of the American Union, butcheries even still more revolting have been committed during the last ten years frequently. These facts we point out in no intention of soothing the outraged sense of the country in the case before us; but to teach that sense how to go on to its duty of asserting the sanctity of human life without degenerating into a blind injustice to masses of good citizens who look on the Biddulph horror in all the emotion proper in such a case of the part of Christian men. Now, when the newspapers recorded the hundred outrages of which this in Biddulph is one, do they add in any of the ninety-nine, that the murdered men are Protestants, that the murderers are Protestants. In the score of such crimes recorded within a few years by our journals in their American news, never a word has been said charging even one of them upon the religious associations of the murderers — upon the Protestants. Irish Catholics certainly never thought of such a discrimination; but placed the crime in every instance where it properly belongs — not to classes or creeds or nationalities, but to our common humanity. Does not this simple contrast put to shame the national antipathies and the sectarian animosities which have employed the Biddulph-reproduction from Kentucky, of a revolting crime, to set the brand of murder upon the brows of the Tipperary men, the Irishmen, the Catholics, of Biddulph, a large community of honest and orderly men who have placed their civic virtues in proof by the reduction of a Canadian forest to the condition of their prosperous and smiling farms?