treasonable projects of their allies. To say that prostitution, such as this, of the forms of justice to the encouragement of disaffection and crime, must be in the highest degree de structive to the welfare of the country and to the respect for the laws, is indeed needless to say that it ought to be visited with the heaviest consequences of a parliamentary impeachment, is to say less than its criminality deserves. It may be asked, "Would you then advocate the principle that the persons charged with enforcing the laws in Ireland should be allowed to shed the blood of the people without even an enquiry being made as to their motives ?" We reply, we would give them the rights to which private individuals are entitled. Some years since a gentleman in the south of Ireland, being aroused from his bed by the sound of robbers entering his house, and finding no weapon at hand, save a carving knife, seized it, stationed himself at his bed-room door, and stabbed to the heart successively the three first of the gang as they entered. The fourth grappled with him and both rolled in mortal strife upon the floor. The gentleman made an ineffectual attempt to stab the ruffian, and perceiving the point of the weapon was turned, he deliberately straightened it on the floor, and killed him also. The remainder of the gang fled. The gentleman in reward for his heroism received the honour of Knighthood, Had he lived in these days, and seen a policeman defending his life against the murderous assault of a gang of Whitefeet, he would have been most fortunate if he were not honoured with a crown prosecution before a jury composed of the accomplices of the ruffians from whose presence he had liberated society, and, even if acquitted, yet dismissed from his situation for having endeavoured to check "the patriotism and love of liberty of the Irish people." It is, doubtless, well known to our readers that the fortifications of the Dardanelles consist, in a great degree, of huge mortars cut in the rock, for the purpose of throwing stone bullets into the enemy's vessels passing underneath. Let us suppose one of these great masses falling on the deck of a ship, and, as was not unfrequent, forcing its fearful way clear through the deck and out at the bottom. What should we think of the captain who, in such a case, would summon all the carpenters to repair the deck, while the sea was momentarily rushing in at the bottom? Or should we much more approve of his skill, if he ordered all hands to the pumps, but took no measures to stop the leak ? Yet this is a just illustra tion of Anglo-Irish policy. The leak, the fatal leak, which, whatever exertions may be made to diminish its effects, debilitates the strength, destroys the peace, depraves the heart, and imposes a veto on the improvement of Ireland, is-Popery. Yet the remedy proposed for the evils of Ireland is bodily employment, and such species of education as "will not interfere with the superstition of the natives." There is no doubt that the fracture in the deck ought to be repaired, and the pumps to be kept working. There is no doubt that every means should be adopted to employ the Irish peasantry, and to give them general instruction; but we distinctly assert that the first, or, to speak more correctly, the principal, remedy (as all may be cotemporaneous) for the evils of Ireland, is its conversion from popery; and, without this, all systems for the improvement of this country are not merely vain and fruitless, but actually baneful, inasmuch as men are more dangerous as their natural powers and resources are increased, if their dispositions are not improved in at least an equal proportion. We tell the people of England that the exclusive feeling, the crimes, the hostility to England, manifested by the native Irish, result from popery; and we prove our assertion by the fact, that the instant an Irishman becomes Protestant abandons all these qualities, and the moment an Irishman becomes, papist he acquires them. he We shall state an instance, which shews more eloquently than words can do, the justice of our assertion, that while popery is encouraged in Ireland, it is vain to attempt to ameliorate the condition of that country, even by the most unbounded munificence, or the most elaborate enactments. It is, no doubt, fresh in the recollection of all who read these pages; it is certainly so in that of the Irish Protestants, always glad of an opportunity nation of heretics, and in order to turn the noble generosity of that nation into a tardy disingenuous act of justice. Are such then the people of Ireland? God forbid! Such are not indeed the people of Ireland, for Protestantism is not yet, nor shall, be extinguished in Ireland; but such are the class of native papists, who combine the brutality of savages with the craft and ingenuity of civilized life, and whom Irish demagogues and English theorists, and they alone, dignify with the title of the " people of Ireland." of being grateful to English generosity, that at a time, not long since past, when a famine had been partly brought upon the nation by the fiendish outrages of the native Irishry, in burning all the stores of provisions, and neglecting their farms, while engaged in treasonable excursions, the English people, with that noble munificence which is one of their most genuine characteristics, raised a subscription to an immense amount to relieve the sufferers of all persuasions. Well do we remember the sensation caused by that act; well do we remember the warm gratitude and We ask our English brethren what admiration expressed by the poorer hope can they entertain of gaining the classes of Protestants. We also re- affections of a people labouring under member the eulogies passed at some such baneful influence; a people who meetings of the papist agitators, in those would assert that Ireland. was not an places where they knew it would be re- island, or that the Atlantic was a ported to the people of England, whom rivulet, rather than admit the remotest it was their policy to deceive. We tinge of kindly feeling towards that hear our readers exclaiming at the illi- nation which is at this moment sacriberal tone of this statement ;-justly, ficing her only Irish friends to favor no doubt, if the statement were to stop and promote the dark and deep-laid here. Ere they come to such a con- designs of these ungrateful traitors? clusion, let them, however, mark the We ask them, why should they attempt following facts, for the truth of which to give power to a people whose highest we pledge our veracity, and let them aim and most sacred object is the ruin then proceed to pass judgment on our of England ; and who are not only disilliberality. Well do we remember ob- posed by inveterate prejudice, but daily serving that to the feeling we have de- taught, by the priests of their idolatry, scribed there appeared no responsive to turn every power and resource they chord in the hearts of the lower orders would thus obtain to the injury of Great of papists, the very class to whose Britain? Why should they at the atrocities the distress was owing, and national expense educate them in the to the relief of whom the money had, tenets of their anti-English superstiin many cases, been, by the contrivance tion? They would reply, perhaps, of the priesthood, exclusively applied. that they hoped by degrees to weaken On inquiring into the cause of such the influence of popery; that any obstinate, we had almost said brutal, education is nearer to Protestantism ingratitude, they coolly informed us than none. We tell our English that the people of England never had brethren that Protestantism was not subscribed any such sum; that the with them-was not with their anceswhole was a legacy left by the late tors-was not, nor ever will be, with King; and, to remove the necessity of any individual, or any nation, the gratitude even to the memory of a Pro- fatherless and accidental offspring of testant and a British sovereign, they the undirected depravity of the natural added, and, as they stated, on the best intellect of man. Mere intellectual authority, for they were told it by the education will never produce Propriest, that this was done in remorse, testantism; employment, commerce, in payment of a sum left by James the wealth, will never produce ProtestantSecond by his will, to be applied to clear ism and without Protestantism the off money borrowed by him in Ireland. sun of virtue, peace and happiness, can Thus did they, by the aid and insti- never rise upon the Irish shores. True gation of their priesthood, and influit is that all these things should be enced by hereditary and religious hatred to England, invent, and persuade themselves and each other into believing this monstrous fabrication, rather than endure the idea of gratitude to a : ་ ཆ done, that they should be done actively, energetically, perseveringly. True it is that they should long since have been done, not merely for the sake of Ireland-for the sake of Eng land, of the empire at large, the resources of this country should have been called forth by the uttermost power of that empire. But we deprecate the theory that these alone can improve Ireland; that these alone can benefit the empire-we deprecate the theory which would whet the edge of the weapon while the point is aimed at our breast, and the hilt in the hand of our deadly enemy. All these measures will, indeed, be beneficial to the empire when united with a steady, fearless enforcement of the law, and, above all things, a system of Protestant religious education. We shall next notice another most preposterous theory which appears prevalent in the sister island, and than which none can be more opposite to the fact. It is the theory which indu-. ces some persons to denominate, and what is worse to treat, the popish part of the native Irish as the Irish people. Now, what would these sage theorists, we address ourselves to those who are misled, not to the crafty knaves who are deliberately misleading them, what would they think of the sanity of any man who was to call the pedlers, gyp sies, manufacturers' apprentices, day labourers, and paupers of England, "the people of England?" Yet these classes and those of the same level bear a greater numerical, and at least as great a moral, proportion to the other inhabitants as the papist Irish do to the Protestant. Would they then deem them more worthy of this title, if they all united in adopting a creed at variance with the established religion, or if they had for generations been signalized by repeated violation of the law; and contempt of the principles of social order and civilization? Yet because this class in Ireland, a portion of the inhabitants neither by rank, wealth, education, property, or any other title whatever, possessed of a right to any influence in Ireland, yet call themselves, and are called by their slave-drivers "the agitators," "the Irish people." The people of England acquiesce in the impudent assumption, and think, theorize, speak, act, and legislate, as if the whole body of the land-owners, farmers, merchants, clergy, nobility and gentry, as well as above a million and a half of the finest peasantry of Ireland, had been actually already annihilated. This is surely sufficiently absurd; but we have not done with the theorists. Of all the errors prevalent in the minds of the English people, perhaps the worst in its consequences, and yet the most excusable, is the notion that with respect to the subject of scriptural education the people of Ireland are divided into two parties, Protestants who will not have education without the Scriptures, and papists who will not endure it with the Scriptures. There never was, perhaps, a theory more wholly and egregiously unfounded. It would be much nearer to the truth to assert, that among the people of Ireland there was not on this subject a dissentient voice; that the whole nation were unanimously desirous of scriptural education. We do not consider the popish priesthood a part of the nation, nor, in fact, does the policy of their church suffer them to become a part of the people of any country, but merely to continue as the janissaries of superstition unconnected with the nation by any domestic or local tie. We think we shall not exceed the fact, however repugnant it may be to English theory, when we state, that, with the exception of these priests and a very few of their agents, the laybrothers, who are perhaps the most depraved, superstitious, crafty, and disaffected, inhabitants of the whole empire, there is scarcely a man among the lower classes in Ireland who would not prefer a scriptural education, not only to no education, but actually to any other education whatsoever. Nay, to, such a degree does this desire of scriptural education pervade the lower orders, that in numerous instances the heaviest denunciations of their priests, and even excommunication itself, have been found ineffectual to prevent their attendance at schools where the scriptures are read. We shall state only one instance out of the numbers daily falling under our observation which illustrate this position. Most of our readers are aware that a society had been for many years established in Ireland under the name of the Kildareplace Society, the principle of which was, that in all its schools the Bible should be read without note or comment. This society was in fact so liberal in its principles as to have almost incurred the disapprobation of some of the more uncompromising Protestants. It suc ceeded, however. The government gave a grant of money to extend its efficacy. It became a general favorite with all classes and persuasions; and had diffused education to a greater extent than has ever been effected by any other system; when the popish priests and agitators became alarmed at a change so fatal to their dominion. They acted a double game; the one threatened the people with excommunication, and the other insinuated in no ambiguous terms the vengeance of the midnight assassin, if they suffered their children to attend the schools. The unhappy peasantry in some cases resisted this outrageous act of inquisitorial tyranny, but in general they were compelled to submit; and as soon as their masters had attained this point, they assailed the government and the legislature with representations of the unpopularity of the Society, and at length succeeded, through the weakness of some, and the want of principle in others, in procuring the withdrawal of the grant, and thus paralyzing the exertions of the Society. It had been the habit of the Society to give annual grants to such of the schoolmasters in connection with it as were found deserving, as well as to supply books and other necessaries for the schools, and when necessary, to assist in the building of school-houses. Of course, when the parliamentary grant was withdrawn, these were discontinued for want of means, and many of the schoolmasters were obliged to join other societies. The national grant was transferred to that agent and offspring of the popish priesthood, bombastically denominated the "National Education Board;" the principle of which is to give the children greater qualifications for good or evil, and to take chance to which they will be turned. What was the result? The people in many instances, and even the popish schoolmasters, rather than place themselves under the patronage of this "No-Light Board," as it was emphatically called, although it held out great pecuniary advantages in order to swell its lists, and to make plausible returns, yet went over to the Hibernian Society, one so Protestant and proselytizing in its nature that its leading principle is to insist on the use of the Protestant margin-noted Bible in all its schools, yet to this Society did the popish peasantry and schoolmasters in many instances attach themselves, in defiance of the infuriated anathemas of their priests, rather than give up the use of the holy Scriptures. But this number was but small; the immense majority yielded to temporal and spiritual terrors, and either relinquished education entirely, or sent their children on particular occasions to make a shew at the schools of the Education Board, which the priests just so far supported by these means as was necessary to enable it to wear the appearance of efficiency, and to prevent the adoption of any better system. Such has been the policy of the popish priesthood; and such their success in deceiving the English nation into listening to them, as if they were expressing the sentiments of their unhappy slaves, who groaned under the success of those measures which they were represented as desiring, and who were at heart attached to that society which these representations had been employed to destroy. The limits of an article like- the present, will not permit us to do more than merely state the general outline of the erroneous theories to which is, in a great measure, to be attributed that almost unbroken train of mismanagement which has rendered Ireland a stain, rather than an ornament, to the British empire. In fact, so uniform has this misgovernment been for centuries past, from the first authentic annals of this country to the present hour, that even when a change of ministry has kindled sanguine anticipations with respect to an improvement in our policy towards every other portion of the world, the people of Ireland-that is, those who hold the property, education and intelligence of the countrylook on the change with that dejected indifference which is the result of an almost superstitious feeling, produced by long experience, that Ireland will prove an exception-that towards Ireland all ministers will prove incompetent-that Ireland is doomed to misgovernment-that Irish policy is the Charybdis that swallows up, without hope of benefit, all the systems adopted for her improvement. We have endeavoured to show, not perhaps all the causes of this apparent fatality, and certainly not all, nor even a con siderable part of its modes of operation; for we do not wish in this article to notice the misconduct of individual administrations; but at least enough to demonstrate that this state of things is not the consequence of any intrinsic incapacity in the nation to receive improvement, but exclusively of the injudicious means which have been adopted-to the obstinate and perverse adherence to theories wholly at variance with the fact-and to the infatuated practice of consulting rather their avowed enemies than their approved friends, which has so long dis. graced, and so often injured the English nation. We would remind our English brethren, that the annoyance which they are suffering at present from Irish affairs-and we admit that annoyance to be very great-(and we are assured that if they do not most rapidly and completely change their present policy it will soon become incalculably greater, and ere long pass the limits of mere annoyance) is, in fact, their own fault; and that if they had given to Ireland at the commencement of their dominion here, that attention which it was their duty to give, and which they gave not only to their own country, but to every other portion of the globe which they reduced under their dominion, Ireland would now be the strongest and most attached dependance of the empire, instead of a perpetual source of embarrassment and danger, which it is at present difficult, and soon likely to be impossible, to reduce even within the bounds of nominal allegiance. If Great Britain had paid us regularly the interest of that attention which was our due, we would not now demand the principal; if she had uniformly acted on the sound and conscientious policy of James the First; if she had compelled the colonists to act up to her principles and their duty; if she had made the moral and religious improvement of the people, the development and application of the resources, and the promotion of the agriculture and manufactures of Ireland the first object of her Irish policy, instead of contenting herself with retaining possession by force-controlling, when they interfered with her safety, the effects of ignorance and superstition, without an attempt, or even a desire, to remove their cause-making use of the peasants for soldiers, and the land to raise provisions for their fleets, but never exerting themselves to teach the former to worship his God, or to render the latter available to the comfort of its population. If Great Britain had even acted towards Ireland with clear, rational, judicious attention to her own interest, that country would now boast the most enlightened, loyal and happy people in the world, and her almost infinite resources would be easily and cheerfully applied to support even more than her share of the burdens of the empire. Let us, then, hear no more complaints of the time occupied by Irish affairs from those who are at last compelled to smart under the consequences of their own culpable misconduct. The true ground of shame, and sorrow, and indignation is, not that English statesmen and legislators are at length compelled to pay up the long accumulated arrear of attention to Irish interests, but that that attention is directed, not with a sound, conscientious and constitutional endeavour to repair the evils of former neglect, but with a cowardly, unprincipled and blind subservience to sedition and treason; that their acts are calculated, not to promote the cause of religion, good order and peace, but with an impious and suicidal infatuation to hasten on the gigantic strides of their and our ruin. If, then, we are asked the comprehensive question-" Men and Brethren, what shall we do?" we reply-Relinquish theories; be guided by facts; exert yourselves to become acquainted with these facts; banish from your imagination the idea of any system for tranquillizing Ireland without removing superstition and implanting true religion in its stead; abandon the notion that the evils of Ireland are owing to the existence of two parties in the island; and learn, or you will learn when too late, that they are to be attributed to the existence of one party in Ireland-the popish priesthood; that that party are, in their nature and essence, hostile to all improvement, and dark, crafty and treacherous enough to render that hostility effectual, and that in proportion to the degree, not that that party are opposed, but that they are yielded to, the miseries of Ireland will increase. Above all things, |