this island; nay, more, we would admit that the baneful results of one error, had a strong natural tendency to lead them into the next, especially when acting upon mistaken principles, and comparative ignorance of facts. But while we would disclaim the intention, and shun the appearance of every harsh language or feeling, and while we feel assured that England is at length becoming acquainted with its mistake and deriving valuable experience from the conduct of those perjured and ungrateful traitors whom it has so long encouraged, and at length admitted to a share in its legislation, we feel it not less our duty to take every opportunity of exposing the most ruinous causes of these ruinous effects of Anglo-Irish policy.

We have laid it down as our most decided opinion, and one which we think will be confirmed by the most intimate study of our national history and circumstances, that the leading English theory. as contrasted with the Irish fact, to which all or most of the errors in policy of which we complain may be traced, is the supposition that Ireland being an integral part of the empire, the native Irish were qualified to be treated as citizens of that empire. The source of this error was simply this the numbers of the colonists produced a similarity of feeling and action between the ostensible portion of the the people and the mother country, which induced the latter to forget that every particle of British character for which they gave credit to the whole nation, was in fact confined to the British colonists. Thence also they acquired a habit of confounding the natives with the colonists, who are in reality at this day as distinct, or nearly so, from them in feelings, character, and principles, as at the period of their first colonization. They would have started at the idea of treating the natives as English citizens, when they saw their character displaying itself in its full vigour on their first acquaintance with the island. Any man who had at that time proposed to give them the power of legislating even for their own island, not to say for the whole empire, would have been deemed insane. Do these suppose that such a change has been wrought in these people in the interval, as to

qualify them for this office? or rather, to speak more correctly, do they suppose that such a change has been made in their moral and religious character in that interval, as to render them so much more improved in proportion to the people of England, that they who were notoriously unfit to be trusted with the power of legislating for Eng land in the state in which England and Ireland were four centuries since, should now be qualified to be trusted with such power in the state in which England and Ireland are at this day? for if the proportionate civilization, not of the two nations, but of the one nation, and the aboriginal portion of the other, be not materially altered, it is obvious that that aboriginal portion is as unfit to legislate for the former now as at any previous period. Now, what grounds have the British nation for the supposition, nay, for such a certainty as would justify the alteration of their constitution in consequence, that this gigantic improvement has actually taken place? This question is very easily answered. These people have in several parts of the island learned a smattering of the English language; a few of them have been taught to spell and read; they have imitated to a certain extent, the English habit of enclosing fields and living in houses, and have adopted a few of the most obvious conveniences of clothing and tillage. Imperfect, however, as are their ideas of comfort or cleanliness, even these seem rather imposed on them by the necessity of intercourse with the colonists, than by any natural taste. These are, we fearlessly assert, the sole grounds which have induced the supposition, that these people are so changed from what they were at the first colonization of the island, that whereas at that time they were confessedly unfit to legislate, even for themselves-they are now competent lawgivers for themselves, for the colonists, and for the whole British empire. And all this improvement is to be presumed on such trivial grounds as we have described, and in open defiance of the glaring facts, that they retain their old idolatrous superstitions in their grossest form; that they glory in the most audacious violation of the laws; that they boast of their hatred to Britain; and that this very hatred is

selected by their ring-leaders as the most powerful and deep-rooted motive by which to urge them to action; and that they daily and hourly display a ferocity more brutal and sanguinary than what they showed four centuries since. Yet these are the beings to whom an English parliament entrusted the office of appointing legislators to alter or destroy our institutions, properties, and even our lives. We shall not enter at length into the motives which induced a British parliament to try this fatal experiment. Some were actuated by that mock liberality which proceeds from secret dislike to religion, or total and wilful misconception of the term charity. Some were desirous to gain the assistance upon which they knew they could securely count in furthering their own revolutionary schemes. Some were guided by that feeling which is common to timid politicians and cowardly soldiers, when each man runs away because his neighbour runs away; and this he calls yielding with a philosophical enlargement of mind to the spirit of the times. Some thought that because the measure had been often proposed, it 'must at length be passed, and hoped by voting for it, to rid themselves of any further trouble on the subject. Many, ignorant alike of the Irish character and the popish religion, hoped by granting power to that church to weaken its influence. The result, the bitter, the degrading result, has already forced itself on the attention of the empire; and Great Britain has seen the day when the majority of her representatives, expressing her national feelings, have been trampled down and dictated to by the insensate insolence of savages, nurtured by their agitators in hatred to British connection, and trained by their priests in the belief that heaven is like the pit of a theatre, where admission can be gained by paying money at the door. Such has been, and such will be in a far greater degree, the reward which Britain will reap for that unconstitutional, irreligious, and irrational act, which consummated the errors of the Irish policy. It is little better than hypocrisy to say that we pity her; that we, whose liberties, religion, and lives have been sported with in the whirlpool of unconstitutional experiment, who have seen her errors from the

commencement, and have witnessed the bigoted contempt with which our faithful warnings were disregarded for the hollow sophistries and audacious lies of those traitors, who, having for centuries laboured in vain to destroy Great Britain, at length adopted the more successful plan of inducing her to destroy herself. It were little better than hypocrisy to say that we could pity England for the consequences of the emancipation act-for the effects of having taken the legislative power from the hands of accomplished and honorable gentlemen, to confer it upon disaffected and superstitious boors. We do not pity England, because she has richly deserved these consequences. We do not pity England, because we are assured that this lesson will do her good; and that, however painful, degrading, and mischievous it may be, that the majority of her representatives should day after day be overborne, and a ministry in whom she places no confidence be supported in office by a gang of perjured papists, who feeling themselves as much cut off from others by their manners and station, as united among themselves by restless disaffection, band together like a pack of wolves upon every measure; yet we feel a strong, and, we think, a well-grounded hope, that she will be aroused to the necessity of retracing her steps, and altering her Irish policy before it is wholly too late; and that she will become aware that the progress of information, and facility of intercourse, acting as a syphon between the countries, if she does not raise, not the power and privileges, but the habit and principles, of Connaught and Munster to the standard of Kent and Yorkshire, will sink the latter to the level of the former.

But the emancipation act, as it is absurdly called, was not the sole, though the principal and most efficient, evil consequence of the unfounded theory that the native Irish were assimilated in feelings and character to the colonists, or to the English; or that the best means to produce such an assimilation was to confer political power and privileges upon them, and thus to remove every earthly inducement to improve. It is the habit of those to whom the government of this ill-fated country has been committed, rather to

look to the beauty of the means than their adaptation to the end to be attained; rather to consider whether their measures are suited to the ideas and tastes of the people of England than to the peculiar circumstances and character of the native Irish, and as soon as experience and acquaintance with Irish facts had induced any of those persons to alter his English theories or change his line of policy, he was immediately recalled by the government at the other side as being no longer fit to fufil his office. Improvement under such a system was hopeless. Even to retain possession would have been impossible but for the powerful strength of the garrison of colonists; yet we hear persons coolly expressing their surprise that Protestantism and its concomitant civilization should have made so little progress in Ireland; and saying that the church of Ireland had neglected its duty, and was in fact a useless establishment; when the fact is, that the only ground of surprise to the rational investigator of Irish history is, how, under such a system, the church is able to support its existence, working, as it has done, against a most powerful tide of opposition from without, and either neglect, or yet more baneful interference and discouragemeut, from at home.

It may be true that the church of Ireland has not at all times exerted itself as much as it ought to have done, and that, even under existing circumstances, somewhat more might have been than actually has been effected. To admit this is no more than to acknowledge that its members have been human beings; and does not even militate against the assertion, the truth of which we firmly believe, that the church of Ireland is the most pure and perfect institution of the kind in the world. But for those who have wholly neglected their own duty, nay, have actually been zealously engaged in preventing the success which they presume to blame the church of Ireland for not having effected; for them to call that church an inefficient establishment-for the landlords who have preferred papist tenants for the masters who have chosen papist servants-for the gentry who have patronised papist tradesmen, and the farmers who have encouraged

papist cottagers and labourers, and this to such an extent and with such persevering uniformity as not only to hold out a constant premium to the natives for continuing in their ancient superstition and retaining all those half-savage tenets, and principles which it was the duty of England to have exerted her whole power to extirpate, but actually to render it difficult for the poorer colonist himself to resist the powerful temptation to adopt the idolatry and character of the native-for these men to stalk forth and charge the consequences of their own selfish, unprincipled, and narrowminded criminality upon that system which in spite of their endeavours has succeeded in maintaining Protestantism and civilization, and even in some degree extending their influence-this may be natural, but, if it be, it is natural depravity.

We cannot, indeed, be surprised that such men should gladly grasp at the opportunity of undoing the Irish Protestant church, the

scapegoat of their iniquities; but however they may in this nefarious attempt succeed for a moment, the truth will soon be made manifest, and the guilt of the present state of Ireland be heaped, as it deserves, on the head of English government and Anglo-Irish religious covetousness.

But to proceed: one of the most remarkable instances of an English theory, contrasted with the Irish result, and originating in the administration of Irish affairs by men acquainted only with English habits and character, is to be found in the constant habit of instituting, or permitting to be instituted, government investigations and prosecutions against the magistracy and police for the execution of their duty. Now this is frequently done from the most sincere desire to vindicate the cause of justice; and, as in the case of court martials in the navy on officers whose ships have been fairly captured, merely with a view to clear the character of the accused: but on the other hand, they are more commonly instituted in subservience to the mean, vacillating, miserable, double-dealing policy, which, instead of manfully standing forth to avenge the insulted majesty of the law, at one moment makes a puny effort to enforce it, and the next

soothes and apologises to the rebels for having attempted to control them. -But the ruinons effects of this system -are not confined to the cases where the motive is such as we have last described; and to understand the reasons why this practice, even in cases in which in England it would be beneficial, is in this country productive of the worst results, it will be necessary to compare briefly the character of the two nations, as natural, and as fostered by circumstances. Steadiness is the characteristic of the English, quickness of the Irish, character. The laws of -England having been of their own creation, enforced by themselves, or rather by officers chosen from themselves, and with that uniformity which is the result of the national character, and looked on rather as bonds of social, than engines of political government; the disposition of the English is to obey the laws, unless powerfully tempted to the contrary; and, viewing the laws rather as friends than as enemies, they do not consider a trial as a condemnation. In Ireland, on the contrary, these laws are viewed by the unreclaimed part of the population as the arbitrary enactments of foreign power. They have, moreover, never been steadily enforced. These and many other motives, acting on the quick talent which prefers a shilling obtained by ingenuity and danger to a guinea earned by honest industry, have, from generation to generation, with the unfailing aid of the popish priesthood, whose power over their flocks was increased by the number of crimes to which they were made privy by the confessional, reared up the lower Irish papist in the idea that the law and all that enforced it were fair game; the most innocent effects of which principle were poaching, smuggling, and bailiff-beating, but which, engrafted on political designs and religious conspiracy, burst forth in the perpetration of crimes to which no other power but popery could ever have depraved the naturally warm and generous heart of the native Irish.

The worst cause, however, is the unsteadiness of the administration of the law. In proportion to the talent of the individual will be the disposition to overrate the chance of escape, and to underrate that of punishments; so VOL, VI..

that if we consider what are the in ducements to commit crime resulting from the hope of impunity, viz. the possibility that the crime may not be discovered; that the perpetrator may not be known; that if known, he may not be corrected; if arrested, tried; if tried, convicted; or if convicted, punished; we shall readily see that all these chances are actually increased in proportion to the talent of the criminal, and that they are yet further magnified by his imagination and consciousness of ingenuity. When we consider, then, the character of the native Irish, it becomes obvious that the greatest activity should be used in enforcing the law. That every possible means should be taken to impress on the people the idea that conviction is the necessary result of crime, and punishment the necessary result of conviction. Now, we fearlessly assert that the system pursued for ages in Ireland, has been directly the opposite. That system has been arbitrary and despotic-despotic, not in degrees, but in nature for the government, and even the magistracy of Ireland, have assumed to themselves the power of dispensing with the laws at pleasure. The government of Ireland have presumed to take the liberty of enforcing only such laws as they approved. They have, in fact, constituted themselves a legislative body. Now, we tell the government of Great Britain, that they are a purely executive machine; that they have no more power to choose when they will enforce a law, or even to soften its most rigorous provisions, unless where such a power is granted to them by express statute, than they have to consecrate a bishop or confer an academical degree. tell the British government that this assumption of power is not only unconstitutional, but that it has produced more evil in Ireland, than perhaps any other cause in existence.

We

If there is any feature in the Irish character more prominent than the rest, it is the disposition to trace disagreeable events to any possible cause, however improbable and absurd, rather than to their own acts. If a master discharges a drunken or dishonest footman, not only the culprit, but all his fellows, attribute this, not to the fault of the man, but to the influence

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of some other servant, or even of some friend of the family. The lower Irish always prefer to discover a circuitous rather than a direct cause. If a man is hanged for an offence, they attribute it to his having belonged to a particular party. If he is pardoned, to the influence of a judge, a juror, or a magistrate. This forms another source of influence to the popish priesthood, who always take to themselves the merit of preventing the enforcement of the law. It is obvious that with a people like this prosecutions should be active and uniform, punishments should be definite, and pardons exceedingly rare.

Now the fact is, that there is a greater power exercised by the Irish government of not enforcing laws, a greater uncertainty in the statutary punishment, and more frequent pardons, than in any other part of the empire. The government also act on the extraordinary principle, that the degree in which indulgence should be shewn to any particular violation of the law should be in proportion to its prevalence, that is, it should bear, not an inverse, as it ought to be, but a direct proportion to that prevalence. The proposition that a law should be abrogated the instant that it becomes disagreeable to those whom it was designed to control, is no doubt sufficiently absurd; but what shall be said to the notion that a government invested with powers purely executive should assume a right to neglect the enforcement of the laws in proportion to the refractory and uncivilized hostility to them displayed by the natives? yet such has been, not in one or two instances merely, but so constantly as almost to amount to a system, the principle on which Ireland has been governed.

It is easily seen how such a system must tend to increase the disposition we have noticed; and to induce the lower Irish to regard a government prosecution as a proof of the hostility of government to the accused, and of their disapprobation of his acts, rather than as a regular and necessary means of ascertaining, either whether he committed the acts, or whether those acts were blameable or praiseworthy, and laying the guilt upon the right persons. The effect of this is to

induce these people to confound a trial with a conviction, at least so far as the feelings of the government are concerned. To illustrate this by an instance. A ringleader of ribbonmen is instigating a peasant to attack and burn a house and its inmates; or a priest, in admonishing his flock, to rescue a distress for tithes. The savage replies, that certain of his friends had been killed by the police in a similar attempt. The ready, and to them satisfactory reply is this, "Well, but were not the police tried for it." The police were tried and acquitted, but the prosecution was viewed as a proof of the indignation of the government against those who enforced the law, and the acquittal as evidence of the want of true Irish spirit in the jury. The unhappy wretch goes off on his mission of treachery and blood, encouraged by the thought that the government secretly approve his acts, and that the magistracy and police, having been visited with a public prosecution for having interfered with him before, will not be willing to expose themselves to another.

And he judges rightly, for it were to expect more than human sense of duty to suppose that those men would willingly hazard a second chance of a jury who would view their execution as a grateful offering to their favourite superstition. When we state our most decided conviction that such conduct is in the highest degree injurious to Ireland, we would be understood to speak of such cases when the facts are publicly known, and where the government, fully aware that the taking away of life, or other act done by the officers of the law, took place in the execution of their duty, intend the prosecution as a means of justifying them. There are two other cases of which we would use different language. The one, where there is reasonable ground to suspect that the police transgressed their duty, in which case an investigation is necessary; the other, which too frequently has occurred of late, where a government, supported in office by a seditious faction, and owing their places and the success of their measures to the cooperation of the public enemy, are afraid to sanction the enforcement of those laws which would tend to prevent or retard the