Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 January 1878 — How Ireland is to be Set Free. [ARTICLE]

How Ireland is to be Set Free.

O’Donovan Rossa, whose “skirmishing fund” now amounts to $44,373, hints darkly, in the Irish World, at the manner in which he will expend it against England. He quotes a description of a body of Russian cavalry who, “ in a belt round their waist, carry a few pounds of gun-cotton or dynamite, and, with this highly-destructive explosive, they may work incalculable harm.” He adds that gun-cotton and dynamite are not very dear, and leaves the reader to infer that the fund, thus expended, would destroy a great part of England. He adds : “A small charge of gun-cotton, placed sim ply upon a rail and fired with a fuse, suffices to blow several feet of the iron to a distance of many yards, thus rendering the failway unserviceable in an instant. A trooper may dismount., place a charge at the base of a telegraph pole, fire it, and be in his saddle again within sixty seconds. Even light bridges and well-built stockades may be thrown down by the violent detonation of compressed gun-cotton, and forest-roads considerably obstructed by trees thrown across, which are never so rapidly felled as when a small charge of this explosive is fired at their roots.” Rossa claims the iuvention of this kind of warfare, and says, jocularly, that Russia ought to pay him a royalty. He also describes a terribly destructive torpedo that has recently been invented, and says that he will probably be able to obtain the secret of its construction. —New York Si'ii.