On the day of the outrage upon the Metropolitan railway a manifesto from Captain Shannon, of which the following is a copy, was received by the Prime Minister at his official residence in Downing Street. It was written as usual in roughly printed capitals, and, as it bore the Dublin postmark of the preceding day, must have been posted _before the explosion had taken place_. “_To the People of Great Britain and Ireland_: “Fellow countrymen and countrywomen,--The Anarchistic, Nihilistic, Fenian, and similar movements of the past have all been failures. That fact there is no denying. I do not mean to say that there have been no results to the glorious war which has been waged upon a society which is content to stand by heedless and unconcerned while Russia’s many millions of starving and suffering fellow-creatures are the slaves of a system by which the honour, liberty, and life of every man, woman, and child are at the mercy of a tyrant’s whim and the whims of his myrmidons,--a society which looks on smiling while Ireland is groaning under the heel of English oppression, and while capitalists, who yawn as they seek to devise some new vice on which to squander the wealth which has become a burden to them, grind down and sweat the poor, setting one starving man to compete against another for a wage which can scarce find him and his in dry bread. “A society which, calling itself Christian, and having it in its power to mend matters, can, unconcerned, endure such iniquities, is _blood guilty_, and so long as these things last, upon society shall its crimes be visited,--with society must all just men and true wage deadly war. “What has been done hitherto has not been without results. “But for the justice which was executed upon the arch-tyrant, Alexander of Russia; the blow which was struck at English tyranny by the destruction of Clerkenwell prison; the righteous punishment which befell those servants of tyrants and enemies of freedom, Burke and Cavendish,--but for these and other glorious deeds, the bitter cry of the oppressed all over the world had passed unheard and unheeded; Ireland had not wrung from reluctant England the few paltry concessions that have been made, and the dawning of the great day of freedom had been indefinitely postponed. “But notwithstanding all that has been done, the fact remains and cannot be denied that Nihilists, Anarchists, Fenians, and those who, under different names and different leaders, are fighting for freedom throughout the world have, up to the present, failed to accomplish the results at which they aim. “And why? “_Because they have been scattered and separate organisations, each working independently of the other, and having no resources outside itself._ So long as this sort of thing continues nothing can be hoped for but the throwing away of precious lives and sorely needed money to no purpose.