Most people who have read the story of Ireland divested of that halo of cloistral romance, sentiment and song, which presents Erin in the mellow light of a land of untroubled repose, are well aware that in all its recorded ages, paying due credit to its title to religiosity, it has been a country which for inter-racial animosities and political divisions is comparable only with that aggregation of states which until historical research and record had presented them as they truly were, once bore the half-sacred name of Greece. In Ireland the man of the North differs from the man of the South and rarely likes him, the people of the West do not understand the masses of the East and do not want to; we have the stout Men of Munster who scorn the Scottish Huguenots of the North as alien intruders, while the Gentleman of Leinster affects to despise his hard-working and thrifty countryman from Connaught. In a land like this it is not hard to imagine that those who possess a talent for prospering by the promotion of political intrigue and secret societies find themselves at once in an element which is entirely congenial to themselves and their schemes, as well as fruitful of profit in every sense of the word. Their objects, too, are made all the more easily attainable by reason of that peculiar trait in the Irishman's temper which makes him regard an act of treachery to the covenants of any secret organisation, no matter what its objects, as the most hateful of all traitorous acts. It has been well said, indeed, that in Ireland "to inform of a crime is nearly always considered as bad as the crime itself, and to such an extent has this feeling developed that it has become a part of the Irish character and is universal in its application." In a large measure owing to this contempt of the informer by Irishmen, all manner of crime has at all times and in all places gone undetected in every part of the world where Irishmen have developed large Irish settlements, and it was precisely for the foregoing reasons that the great Molly Maguire Conspiracy was, in the first place, able to come into existence and, in the second, able by the black secrecy attending upon its criminal operations, to mystify the authorities of a great State of the Union for more than a generation. The long series of murders committed by this infamous body in the Pennsylvania coal regions were revolting and brutal to the most cold-blooded degree, were entirely without the barest elements of justification, and for the most part were perpetrated for grievances of a wholly childish and imaginary kind, based mainly on mere personal dislike or other trivial reasons of the sort.