["REMEMBER MITCHELSTOWN" (1887).]
Source.—The Times, October 19.
(Mr. Gladstone at Nottingham): The case I have now to mention goes further than that. It is the Mitchelstown case. I was responsible for putting in a telegraphic answer to a telegram the words, "Remember Mitchelstown," and Mitchelstown will and must be remembered, and the meeting has an account to settle with the Government in respect to Mitchelstown. I should have been glad to have sealed my own lips, had not the Government sent forth its testimony, its solemn, downright, unequivocal judgment that the proceeding at Mitchelstown were right.... What did Mr. Balfour say, when the Irish Nationalist members brought up the question of the proceedings at Mitchelstown? He said that the whole action of the police was in the face of the most tremendous provocation, and absolutely in self-defence. He said that when the order to fire was given the order was to fire only on those portions of the crowd who were engaged in throwing stones.... Three human beings lost their lives under the fire of the police. I cannot say three men, for in the ordinary sense of the word they were not men. Two of them had been men, and were in harmless old age. The other was growing to be a man, and was still in harmless boyhood. Not one of these three persons is even alleged to have thrown a stone. Not one of them, if I recollect aright, is even alleged to have carried a stick.... Is not this a melancholy and a miserable farce—tragic, too, in the highest degree, when we consider that these trumpery proceedings, perhaps of some casual boys or men, who are only able in the utmost of their wrath and in the supply of stones that they could command to break two or three windows in the police barracks—that these are to be represented as leading and heading an attack which caused a humane and intelligent body of the representatives of the Government to fire out of windows, to kill three persons, one of them distant 100 yards away, and two others sixty yards away. I have said, and say again, "Remember Mitchelstown!"
["BLOODY SUNDAY" (1887).]
Source.—Mackail's Life of William Morris, vol. ii., p. 190.
The restlessness among the working classes culminated in the famous scenes of the 13th of November (1887), "Bloody Sunday," in and round Trafalgar Square. A meeting in the Square had been announced to protest against the Irish policy of the Government; it had been proclaimed by the police, and became converted into a demonstration on a huge scale. No one who saw it will ever forget the strange, and indeed terrible, sight of that grey winter day, the vast sombre-coloured crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly through the dusky swaying masses when two squadrons of the Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Only disorganized fragments straggled into the Square, to find that the other columns had also been headed off or crushed, and that the day was practically over. Preparations had been made to repel something little short of a popular insurrection. An immense police force had been concentrated, and in the afternoon the Square was lined by a battalion of Foot Guards, with fixed bayonets and twenty rounds of ball cartridge. For an hour or two the danger was imminent of street-fighting such as had not been known in London for more than a century. But the organized force at the disposal of the civil authorities proved sufficient to check the insurgent columns and finally clear the streets without a shot being fired. For some weeks afterwards the Square was garrisoned by special drafts of police. Otherwise London next day had resumed its usual aspect. Once more the London Socialists had drawn into line with the great mass of the London Radicals, and a formidable popular movement had resulted, which, on that Sunday, was within a very little of culminating in a frightful loss of life and the practical establishment of a state of siege in London. But the English spirit of compromise soon made itself felt.... Measures were taken for the relief of the unemployed. Political Radicalism resumed its normal occupations; and by the end of the year the Socialist League had dropped back into its old place, a small body of enthusiasts among whom an Anarchist group were now beginning to assume a distinct prominence.