Seven months have barely elapsed since the throne of Louis Philippe was overturned, by a sudden and well-concerted urban tumult; and six have not expired since the fervour of revolution invaded the Germanic empire, and Italy, torn by the innovating passions, commenced a strife with the Austrian power. How marvellous have been the changes, how vehement the action, how powerful the reaction, since those events commenced! Involved in the whirlwind of anarchy, the greater as well as the lesser states of Germany seemed to be on the verge of destruction. Austria, tormented by diversity of lineage, race, and interest, seemed to be irrevocably broken up; and amidst the rebellion in Lombardy, the severance of Venice, the insurrection in Bohemia, and the fierce demand of the Hungarians for independence, it seemed scarcely possible to hope that the house of Hapsburg could maintain its existence, or the important element of Austria in the balance of European power be preserved. Torn by contending passions, a prey to the ambition of the republicans, the dreams of the socialists, and the indignation of the loyalists, France resembled a fiery volcano in the moment of irruption, of which the throes were watched by surrounding nations with trembling anxiety for their own existence. Italy, with Sicily severed from the throne of Naples; Rome in scarcely disguised insurrection against the Papal authority; Lombardy, Tuscany, and Venice in open revolt; and Piedmont, under revolutionary guidance, commencing the usual system of external democratic aggression, scarcely presented a spot on which the eye of hope could rest. Prussia, the first to be reached by the destructive flame, seemed so strongly excited, that it was hard to say whether its national unity or monarchical institutions would first fall to pieces. England, assailed by Chartism in the one island, and the approaching insurrection of the Irish in the other; oppressed with a debt to which its finances, under present management, seemed unequal—having borrowed £8,000,000 in a single year of general peace—seemed shaken to its foundation. The distress so generally diffused by the combined effect of free trade and a fettered currency, appeared at once to have dried up its material resources and overturned the wonted stability of the national mind: every thing seemed to be returning to chaos; and even the most sanguine advocates of human perfectibility, the most devout believers in democratic regeneration, looked on with trembling anxiety, and could hardly anticipate any other result from the disturbed passions of society, but a general and sanguinary war, terminating in the irresistible ascendency of one victorious power, or possibly a fresh inundation, over the exhausted field of European strife, of northern barbarians.

But truth is great, and will prevail. There are limits imposed by the wisdom of nature to the madness of the people, not less than the strife of the elements. Extraordinary convulsions seldom fail to restore government, after a time, to a bearable form: the letting loose of the passions of nations ere long rouses the feelings and alarms the interests, which produce reaction, and restore the subverted equilibrium of society. Men will not be permanently ruled by brutal force. Triumph reveals the latent tyranny of the multitude; power brings to light the selfishness and rapacity of their leaders. How strikingly have those truths—so often enunciated, so little attended to—been demonstrated by the events of the last summer! Six months only have elapsed, and what years, what centuries of experience have been passed during that brief period! How many delusions has it seen dispelled, and fallacies exposed; how many pretensions levelled, and expectations blasted; how many reputations withered, and iniquities detected! How much has the peril of inflammatory language been demonstrated, and the hollowness of revolutionary regeneration established! how quickly have words been blown into the air by deeds, and the men of eloquence supplanted by those of the sword! "Words," says Lamartine,[11] "set nations on fire; bayonets alone restore them to reason." Who has furnished such a commentary on these words as Lamartine himself?

Is it the doctrines of the French Revolution which were deemed seductive, its principles insinuating, its example dangerous? The Red Republicans, the insurrection of June, the slaughter of a greater number of men in a single revolt than has taken place in many a decisive battle, the withering agony of Parisian destitution, the ten thousand captives in its dungeons; the nightly transportation, for weeks together, of hundreds of deluded fanatics; the state of siege,—the prostration of freedom, a military dictatorship, rise up in grim and hideous array to dispel the illusion. Is it the Io PÆans of Italian regeneration which have caused the heart of the patriot to throb all over the world, and led the enthusiastic to anticipate a second era of Italian independence in the old age of its civilisation? The defeats on the Adige, the fall of Milan, the dispersion of the Lombard and Tuscan levies, tell us how miserable was the delusion on which such expectations rested, and how vain is the hope that a selfish and worn-out nation, destitute alike of civil firmness or military courage, can successfully establish its independence. Is it from Rome that this regeneration of society is expected to arise, and the reforming pope who is to be the Peter the Hermit of the new crusade in favour of the liberties of mankind? Behold him now trembling in his palace, bereft of authority, deprived of consideration; hated, despised, discrowned; waiting to see which of the Tramontane powers is to send a regiment of horse to receive the keys of the Eternal City, and give a lasting ruler to the former mistress of the world.

Is it Prussia that is to take the lead in the regeneration of the world, and from the north that a new Arminius is to issue, to assert the liberties of the great Teutonic family of mankind? Turn to Berlin, and see to what a pitiable degree of weakness revolutionary triumphs have reduced the monarchy of the Great Frederick. Behold its monarch and its army defeated by a band of students and shop-boys; its arsenal pillaged by an insurgent mob; and the power which withstood the banded strength of Europe, a century ago, and fronted Napoleon in the plenitude of his power, waging a doubtful and aggressive war with Denmark, a fifth-rate power, and paralysed by processions of apprentices, and the menaces of trades-unions, in the capital. Is it Ireland that is regarded as the sheet-anchor of the cause of revolution, and from the Emerald Isle that the bands of heroes are to issue who are to crush the tyranny of England, restore the freedom of the seas, and avenge the long quarrel of the Celt with the Saxon? It is in Boulagh Common that we must look for the exploits of the new Spartan heroes, and among the widow's cabbages we must search for the grave of a modern Leonidas! Is it in the energy, courage, and perseverance of the army of Tipperary, that we must find the realisation of the long-cherished hopes of Irish independence, and the demonstration of the solid foundation on which the much vaunted prospects of Hibernian success against British oppression is to be founded! It must augment the admiration which all the world must feel at the gallant conduct of the Irish, in this memorable struggle, to reflect that they owed their success to themselves alone; that none of their arms had been purchased, nor preparations made, with the wealth of the stranger; that they had spurned the charity of England as proudly as they had repelled its arms; and that, whatever could be cast up against them, this, at least, could not be said, that they had evinced ingratitude for recent benefits, or eaten the bread of their benefactor while they were preparing to pierce him to the heart!

Memorable, indeed, has been the year which has given these examples, and taught these lessons, to mankind. History will be sought in vain for a period in which, during so short a time, so many important political truths were unfolded, so many moral precepts taught, by suffering; or in which, after being for a season obscured by clouds, the polar star of religion and duty has shone forth with so bright a lustre. It is a proud thing for England to reflect on the exalted post she has occupied during this marvellous and trying time. While other nations, possessed of far greater military forces, were reeling under the shock, or prostrated by the treachery and treason of their defenders, she alone has repelled the danger by the constable's baton. She has neither augmented her army, nor increased her navy; she has not added a gun to her ships, nor a bayonet to her battalions. She has neither yielded to the violence of the Revolutionists, nor been guilty of deeds of cruelty to repress them. If her government is to blame for their conduct during the crisis, it is for having been too lenient—for having dallied too long with agitation, and winked at sedition till it grew into treason. A fault it undoubtedly has been, for it has brought matters to a crisis, and caused the ultimate outbreak to be repressed with far greater and more unavoidable severity than would have been required if the first merciful coercion had taken place. Had the Habeas Corpus Act been suspended in November, and the farce of Irish patriotism been hindered from turning into a burlesque tragedy, for one person whom it would have been necessary to imprison or transport, fifty must now undergo that punishment. Yet is this leniency or temporisation, misplaced as it was, and calamitous as it has turned out, a proud passage in England's story. It is some consolation to reflect that she conquered the revolutionary spirit, by which so many of the military monarchies of Europe had been prostrated, by moral strength alone; that scarce a shot was fired in anger by her troops, and not a drop of blood was shed on the scaffold; and that undue forbearance and lenity is the only fault which, during the crisis, can be imputed to the government which braved the storm under which the world was reeling.

Nor is the moral lesson less striking, or less important, which France, during the same period, has read to mankind. She has not, on this occasion, been assailed by the Continental powers. No Pitt or Cobourg has stood forth to mar, by ensanguined hostility, the bright aurora of her third Revolution. No Louis Philippe has stepped in, to change its character or intercept its consequences, and reap for royalty the fruits of insurrection. No bands of Cossacks or plumed Highlanders have again approached the capital of civilisation, to wrest from Freedom the rights she has acquired, or tear from her brows the glory she has won. Whatever she has gained, or suffered, or lost, has been owing to herself, and herself alone. Europe has looked on in anxious, it may be affrighted, neutrality. Though undermined every where by the spirit of propagandism, though openly assailed in some quarters by scarcely disguised attacks, the adjoining powers have abstained from any act of hostility. Albeit attacked by a revolutionary expedition, fitted out and armed by the French government at Paris, Belgium has attempted no act of retaliation. Victorious Austria, though grievously provoked, has accepted the mediation of France and England: when Turin was at his mercy, the triumphant Radetsky sheathed his victorious sword at Milan, and sought not to revenge on Piedmont the unprovoked aggression which its revolutionary government had committed on the Imperial dominions in Italy. Russia has armed, but not moved; the Czar has left to the patriotism and valour of Denmark the burden of a contest with the might of revolutionised Germany. Revolution has every where had fair play; a clear stage and no favour has been accorded to it by all the surviving monarchies in Europe. The enthusiasm of Lamartine, the intrigues of CaussidiÈre, the dreams of Louis Blanc, the ambition of Ledru Rollin, have been allowed their full development. Nothing has intercepted the realisation of their projects. If France has suffered beyond all precedent from her convulsion; if her finances are in a state of hopeless embarrassment; if forty-five per cent has been added to her direct taxes, and the addition cannot be levied from the public distress; if three hundred thousand men have been added to her regular army; if poverty and destitution stalk through her streets; if her jails teem with ten thousand captives, and thousands of families mourn a father or a brother slain on the barricades, or transported for civil war,—the cause is to be found in the Revolution, and the Revolution alone.

The terrible and tragic result of the strife in the streets of Paris in June, has done scarcely a less service to mankind, by opening the eyes of the world to the real nature of crimes which recent events had rendered popular, and restoring their old and just appellation to acts of the deepest atrocity, which the general delusion had caused to pass for virtues. Since the successful result of the Revolt of the Barricades in 1830, the ideas of men have been so entirely subverted, that no government was practicable in France but that of corruption or the sword; and treason and sedition appeared to have been blotted out of the list of crimes in the statute-book of England. So licentious had the age become, and so much was government paralysed by terror at the unprecedented turn which the public mind had taken, that, in Ireland especially, it can scarcely be said, for the last ten years, that, in regard to state offences, there has been any government at all. The Repeal agitation—the wholesale liberation of prisoners by Lord Normanby—the unchecked monster meetings,—the quashing of O'Connell's conviction by the casting vote of one Whig peer, in opposition to the opinion of the twelve judges of England—the unparalleled and long-continued violence of the treasonable press in Dublin—the open drilling and arming of the people in the south and west of Ireland—the undisguised announcement of an approaching insurrection, of which the time was openly fixed for the completion of harvest—were so many indications that Government had become paralysed, and ceased to discharge its functions, in the neighbouring island.

If matters were not as yet so menacing in England, it was not that the executive was more powerful or efficient in this country, but that the English mind was slower to take fire than on the other side of the Channel, and that more weighty interests required to be subverted among the Saxons than the Celts, before the institutions of society were overturned, and anarchy, plunder, and spoliation, became the order of the day. Yet even here there were many indications of Government having become paralysed, and lamentable proof that the public tranquillity was preserved, more by the moderation of its assailants than the strength of its defenders. The violence and general impunity of the trades-unions, in both England and Scotland; the open and undisguised preparations of the Chartists in both countries; the toleration in the metropolis, on two different occasions, of a Chartist Convention, which aspired at usurping the government of the country; the uniform and atrocious violence of the revolutionary press; the entire impunity with which, on every occasion, the most dangerous sedition was spouted on the platform, or retailed in the columns of the journals; the open preparation, at last, of treasonable measures; and the organisation of the disaffected in clubs, where arms were distributed, and projects of rebellion, massacre, and conflagration hatched—were so many indications, and that, too, of the most alarming kind, that matters were approaching a crisis in these islands; and that the paralysis and imbecility of a Government which had ceased to discharge its functions, might prove, as it did in France in the feeble hands of Louis XVI., the precursor of a dreadful and disastrous convulsion.

Thanks to the French revolution and Irish rebellion, this state of matters has met, for the time at least, with a decisive check. The eyes of men have been opened; things are called by their right name. We again hear of treason and sedition—words, of late years, so much gone into disuse that the rising generation scarcely knew what they meant. In France the heroes of the barricades have ceased to be lauded as the greatest of men. Insurrection is no longer preached as the first of social duties. That which was the chief of civic virtues on the 24th February has become the greatest of civic crimes on the 24th June. The soldiers of treason no longer meet with an honoured sepulchre, nor, if surviving, are they fÊted and caressed by royal hands. If killed, they are thrust into undistinguished graves; if taken alive, they are immured in dungeons or transported. Universal suffrage has done that which royalty was too indulgent or too timorous to do—it has ceased the dallying with treason. It has fought the Red Republic with its own weapon, and conquered in the strife. It has erected a military despotism in the great revolutionised capital. Industry, almost destroyed by, the first triumph of anarchy in France, is slowly reviving under the protection of absolute power. With suppression of the trade of the "journaliste," the "Émeutier," and the "homme des barricades," other branches of employment are at length beginning to revive.[12]

Nor is the change less remarkable in Great Britain, where government have not only followed Mr Pitt's example of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, but have passed a special statute, assimilating for two years the punishment of aggravated cases of sedition to what it was by the old common law of Scotland. Great was the abuse which the Whig writers for half a century bestowed on the Scotch Judges in 1793, for applying the punishment of the Scotch law to the sedition of 1793, and transporting Muir and Fische Palmer, for trying to force on a revolution by means of a national convention. The "Martyrs' Monument" in Edinburgh stands as a durable monument of their sympathy. Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Chancellors, has in bitter terms exhaled their collected indignation. But scarcely was the ink of his lordship's lucubrations dry, when he saw fit, as a member of Lord John Russell's cabinet, to bring in a bill to assimilate the punishment of sedition in Ireland to the old law of Scotland; and under it Mitchell has been transported fourteen, and Martin ten years—the very punishments inflicted for similar offences on Muir and Fische Palmer. The difference is, that for one person transported or imprisoned under Mr Pitt's system of timely coercion and prevention, in 1793, in Great Britain and Ireland, a hundred will be transported or imprisoned under the Whig system of long temporisation and final repression, in 1848. So true it is, that undue weakness in the prevention of crime is the inevitable parent of undue sternness in its punishment, and that in troubled times government incur the reality of severity to avoid its imputation.

Not less important, to the final interests of mankind, is the exposure of the real designs and objects of the revolutionary party, over the world, which has now taken place. The days of delusion are gone past; words have ceased to mislead men as to the nature of things. For half a century, men have been continually misled by the generous and elevated language under which the democratic party veiled their real designs. The strength of revolution consists in the power it possesses of rousing effort by the language of virtue, to render it subservient to the purposes of vice. But its designs have now reached their accomplishment: men see what was intended under all this veil of philanthropic intentions. The revolutionists have been victorious in Paris; and immediately their projects of spoliation, anarchy, and plunder, were set on foot, and approached so near their accomplishment, that a desperate and last effort of all the holders of property became indispensable, to prevent the total ruin of society; and carnage to an unheard of extent for three days stained the streets of Paris, to avert the triumph of the Red Republic, and the return of the Reign of Terror. The cry for repeal turned into rebellion in Ireland; and a vast concentration of the forces of England was requisite to prevent the Emerald Isle becoming the theatre of general massacre, devastation, and ruin. For two hours the Chartists got possession of Glasgow, and instantly a general system of plunder and sacking of houses commenced. The Chartist Convention was long tolerated in England, and, in return, they tried to overturn the Government on the 10th April; and organised a general plan of plunder and conflagration, which was to have broken out in the end of August, and was only mercifully prevented by the designs of the conspirators having become known, and the timely vigour of Government having prevented their accomplishment. The ultimate objects of the enemies of society, therefore, have become apparent: deeds have told us what meaning to attach to words. Revolution in France means spoliation, and the division of property, at a convenient opportunity. Repeal in Ireland means the massacre of the Protestants, and the division of their estates at a convenient opportunity. Chartism in England means general plunder, murder, and conflagration, the moment there is the least chance of perpetrating these crimes with impunity.

Ireland has been, in an especial manner, the subject of these general delusions; and there is perhaps no subject on which foreigners, the English, and the Irish themselves, have for so long a period been entirely misled, as in regard to the real cause of the protracted, and apparently irremediable evils of that distracted country. The proneness of the English to believe, that all mankind will be blessed by the institutions under which they themselves have flourished and waxed great, and the virulence with which party ambition has fastened upon Ireland, as the battle-field on which to dispossess political opponents, and gain possession of power, are the main causes of this long-continued and wide-spread misconception. We have to thank the Irish for having, by their reception of the magnificent gift of England in 1847, and subsequent rebellion in 1848, done so much to dispel the general delusion. To aid in disseminating juster views on the subject, we shall proceed to disinter from the earlier volumes of this Magazine, an extract from the first of a series of papers on Ireland, published in 1833, immediately before Lord Grey's Coercion Act, and which might pass for an essay on present events. It affords a striking example, both of the justice of the views there enunciated, and of the pernicious and continual recurrence of those real causes of Irish suffering, which party spirit in both islands has so long concealed from the people of Great Britain.

"It is in vain to attempt to shake ourselves loose of Ireland, or consider its misery as a foreign and extraneous consideration with which the people of this country have little concern. The starvation and anarchy of that kingdom is a leprosy, which will soon spread over the whole empire. The redundance of our own population, the misery of our own poor, the weight of our own poor-rates, are all chiefly owing to the multitudes who are perpetually pressing upon them from the Irish shores. During the periods of the greatest depression of industry in this country since the peace, if the Irish labourers could have been removed, the native poor would have found ample employment; and more than one committee of the House of Commons have reported, after the most patient investigation and minute examination of evidence from all parts of the country, that there is no tendency to undue increase among the people of Great Britain, and that the whole existing distress was owing to the immigration from the sister kingdom.

"Nature has forbidden us to sever the connexion which subsists between the two countries. We must swim or sink together. It is utterly impossible to effect that disjunction of British from Irish interests, for which the demagogues of that country so strenuously contend, and which many persons in this island, from the well-founded jealousy of Catholic ascendency in the House of Commons, and the apparent hopelessness of all attempts to improve its condition, are gradually becoming inclined to support. The legislature may be separated by act of Parliament; the Government may be severed by Catholic revolts; but Ireland will not the less hang like a dead weight round the neck of England; its starving multitudes will not the less overwhelm our labourers; its passions and its jealousies will not the less paralyse the exertions of our Government. Let a Catholic Republic be established in Ireland; let O'Connell be its President; let the English landholders be rooted out, and Ireland, with its priests and its poverty, be left to shift for itself; and the weight, the insupportable weight of its misery, will be more severely felt in this country than ever. Deprived of the wealth and the capital of the English landholders, or of the proprietors of English descent; a prey to its own furious and ungovernable passions; ruled by an ignorant and ambitious priesthood; seduced by frantic and unprincipled demagogues, it would speedily fall into an abyss of misery far greater than that which already overwhelms it. For every thousand of the Irish poor who now approach the shores of Britain, ten thousand would then arrive, from the experienced impossibility of finding subsistence at home; universal distress would produce such anarchy as would necessarily lead the better classes to throw themselves into the arms of any government who would interfere for their protection. France would find the golden opportunity, so long wished for, at length arrived, of striking at the power of England through the neighbouring island; the tricolor flag would speedily wave from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear; and even if England submitted to the usurpation, and relinquished its rebellious subjects to the great parent democracy, the cost of men and ships required to guard the western shore of Britain, and avert the pestilence from our own homes, would be greater than are now employed in maintaining a precarious and doubtful authority in that distracted island.

"Whence is all this misery, and these furious passions, in a country so richly endowed by nature, and subjected to a Government whose sway has, in other states, established so large a portion of general felicity? The Irish democrats answer, that it is the oppression of the English Government which has done all these things; the editors of the Whig journals and reviews repeat the same cry; and every Whig, following, on this as on every other subject, their leaders, like a flock of sheep, re-echo the same sentiment, until it has obtained general belief, even among those whose education and good sense might have led them to see through the fallacy. Yet, in truth, there is no opinion more erroneous; and there is none the dissemination of which has done so much to perpetuate the very evils which are the subject of such general and well-founded lamentation. Ireland, in reality, is not miserable because she has, but because she has not been conquered; she is suffering under a redundant population, not because the tyranny of England, but the tyranny of her own demagogues, prevents their getting bread; and she is torn with discordant passions, not because British oppression has called them into existence, but because Irish licentiousness has kept them alive for centuries after, under a more rigorous Government, they would have been buried for ever.

"It is the more extraordinary that the popular party in both islands should so heedlessly and blindly have adopted this doctrine, when it is so directly contrary to what they at the same time maintain in regard to the causes of the simultaneous rise and prosperity of Scotland. That poor and barren land, they see, has made unexampled strides in wealth and greatness during the last eighty years: its income during that period has been quadrupled, its numbers nearly doubled, its prosperity augmented tenfold; they behold its cities crowded with palaces, its fields smiling with plenty, its mountains covered with herds, its harbours crowded with masts, the Atlantic studded with its sails; and yet all this has grown up under an aristocratic rule, and with a representative system from which the lower classes were in a great measure excluded. In despair at beholding a nation whose condition was so utterly at variance with all their dogmas of the necessity of democratic representation to temper the frame of government, they have recourse to the salutary influence of English ascendency, and ascribe all this improvement to the beneficial influence of English freedom. Scotland, they tell us, has prospered, not because she has, but because she has not, been governed by her own institutions: and she is now rich and opulent, because the narrow and jealous spirit of her own Government has been tempered by the beneficial influence of English freedom. Whether this is really the case, we shall examine in a succeeding Number; and many curious and unknown facts as to the native institutions of Scotland we promise to unfold; but, in the mean time, let it be conceded that this observation is well founded, and that all the prosperity of Scotland has been owing to English influence. How has it happened that the same influence at the same time has been the cause of all the misery of Ireland? The common answer that Scotland was always an independent country, and that Ireland was won and ruled by the sword, is utterly unsatisfactory, and betrays an inattention to the most notorious historical facts. For how has it happened that Ireland was conquered with so much facility, while Scotland so long and strenuously resisted the spoiler? How did it happen that Henry II., with eleven hundred men, achieved with ease the conquest of the one country, while Edward II., at the head of eighty thousand men, was unable to effect the subjugation of the other? How was it that Scotland, not once, but twenty times, expelled vast English armies from her territory, while Ireland has never thrown them off since the Norman standard first approached her shores? And without going back to remote periods, how has it happened that the same influence of English legislation, which, according to them, has been utterly ruinous to Ireland, has been the sole cause of the unexampled prosperity of Scotland? that the same gale which has been the zephyr of spring to the one state, has been the blast of desolation to the other? It is evident that there is a fundamental difference between the two states; and that, if we would discover the cause of the different modes in which the same legislation of the dominant state has operated in the two countries, we must look to the different condition of the people to whom it was applied.

"One fact is very remarkable, and throws a great light on this difficult subject—and that is, that at different periods opposite systems have been tried in Ireland, and that invariably the system of concession and indulgence has been immediately followed by an ebullition of more than usual atrocity and violence.

"The first of these instances is the great indulgence showed to them by James I. That monarch justly boasted that Ireland was the scene of his beneficent legislation; and that he had done more to its inhabitants than all the monarchs who had sat on the English throne since the time of Henry II. He established the boroughs; gave them a right of sending representatives to Parliament; and first spread over its savage and unknown provinces the institutions and the liberties of England. What was the consequence? Did the people testify gratitude to their benefactors? Did they prove themselves worthy of British freedom, and capable of withstanding the passions arising from a representative government? We shall give the answer in the words of Mr Hume.

"'The Irish, everywhere intermingled with the English, needed but a hint from their leaders and priests to begin hostilities against a people whom they hated on account of their religion, and envied for their riches and prosperity. The houses, cattle, goods, of the unwary English were first seized. Those who heard of the commotions in their neighbourhood, instead of deserting their habitations, and assembling for mutual protection, remained at home, in hopes of defending their property, and fell thus separately into the hands of their enemies. After rapacity had fully exerted itself, cruelty, and the most barbarous that ever, in any nation, was known or heard of, began its operations. A universal massacre commenced of the English, now defenceless, and passively resigned to their inhuman foes. No age, no sex, no condition, was spared. The wife weeping for her butchered husband, and embracing her helpless children, was pierced with them and perished by the same stroke. The old, the young, the vigorous, the infirm, underwent a like fate, and were confounded in one common ruin. In vain did flight save from the first assault: destruction was every where let loose, and met the hunted victims at every turn. In vain was recourse had to relations, to companions, to friends; connexions were dissolved, and death was dealt by that hand from which protection was implored and expected. Without provocation, without opposition, the astonished English, living in profound peace and full security, were massacred by their nearest neighbours, with whom they had long upheld a continual intercourse of kindness and good offices.

"'But death was the slightest punishment inflicted by those rebels: all the tortures which wanton cruelty could devise, all the lingering pains of body, the anguish of mind, the agonies of despair, could not satiate revenge excited without injury, and cruelty derived from no cause. To enter into particulars would shock the least delicate humanity. Such enormities, though attested by undoubted evidence, appear almost incredible. Depraved nature, even perverted religion, encouraged by the utmost license, reach not to such a pitch of ferocity, unless the pity inherent in human breasts be destroyed by that contagion of example, which transports men beyond all the usual motives of conduct and behaviour.

"'The weaker sex themselves, naturally tender to their own sufferings, and compassionate to those of others, here emulated their more robust companions in the practice of every cruelty. Even children, taught by the example, and encouraged by the exhortation of their parents, essayed their feeble blows on the dead carcasses or defenceless children of the English. The very avarice of the Irish was not a sufficient restraint of their cruelty. Such was their frenzy, that the cattle which they had seized, and by rapine made their own, were yet, because they bore the name of English, wantonly slaughtered, or, when covered with wounds, turned loose into the woods and deserts.

"'The stately buildings or commodious habitations of the planters, as if upbraiding the sloth and ignorance of the natives, were consumed with fire, or laid level with the ground. And where the miserable owners, shut up in their houses and preparing for defence, perished in the flames, together with their wives and children, a double triumph was afforded to their insulting foes.

"'If any where a number assembled together, and, assuming courage from despair, were resolved to sweeten death by revenge on their assassins, they were disarmed by capitulations and promises of safety, confirmed by the most solemn oaths. But no sooner had they surrendered, than the rebels, with perfidy equal to their cruelty, made them share the fate of their unhappy countrymen.

"'Others, more ingenious still in their barbarity, tempted their prisoners by the fond love of life, to imbrue their hands in the blood of friends, brothers, parents; and having thus rendered them accomplices in guilt, gave them that death which they sought to shun by deserving it.

"'Amidst all these enormities, the sacred name of RELIGION resounded on every side; not to stop the hands of these murderers, but to enforce their blows, and to steel their hearts against every movement of human or social sympathy. The English, as heretics, abhorred of God, and detestable to all holy men, were marked out by the priests for slaughter; and, of all actions, to rid the world of these declared enemies to Catholic faith and piety, was represented as the most meritorious. Nature, which, in that rude people, was sufficiently inclined to atrocious deeds, was farther stimulated by precept; and national prejudices impoisoned by those aversions, more deadly and incurable, which arose from an enraged superstition. While death finished the sufferings of each victim, the bigoted assassins, with joy and exultation, still echoed in his expiring ears that these agonies were but the commencement of torments infinite and eternal.'"

"This dreadful rebellion left consequences long felt in Irish government. Cromwell, the iron leader of English vengeance, treated them with terrible severity: at the storming of a single city, 12,000 men were put to the sword; and such was the terror inspired by his merciless sword, that all the revolted cities opened their gates, and the people submitted, trembling, to the law of the conqueror. The recollection of the horrors of the Tyrone rebellion was long engraven in the English legislature; and it produced, along with the terrors of religious dissension, the severe code of laws which were imposed on the savage population of the country before the close of the seventeenth century. A hundred years of peace and tranquillity followed the promulgation of these oppressive laws. That they were severe and cruel is obvious from their tenor; that they were in many respects not worse than was called for by the horrors which preceded their enactment, and followed their repeal, is now unhappily proved by the result.

"The next great period of concession commenced about the year 1772, soon after the accession of George III. The severe code under which Ireland had so long lain chained, but quiet, was relaxed; the Catholics were admitted to a full share of the representation; the more selfish and unnecessary parts of the restrictions were removed; and, before 1796, hardly any part of the old fetters remained, excepting the exclusion of Catholics from the Houses of Lords and Commons, and the higher situations in the army. Did tranquillity, satisfaction, and peace, follow these immense concessions, continued through a period of thirty years? On the contrary, they were immediately followed by the same result as had attended the concessions of James I. A new rebellion broke out; the horrors of 1798 rivalled those of 1641; and the dreadful recollection of the Tyrone massacre was drowned in the more recent suffering of the same unhappy country.

"The perilous state in which Ireland then stood, imperfectly known at the time even to the Government, is now fully developed. From the Memoirs of Wolfe Tone, recently published, it appears that 250,000 men were sworn in, organised, drilled, and regimented; that colonels and officers for this immense force were all appointed; and the whole, under the direction of the central committee at Dublin, only awaited the arrival of Hoche and the French fleet to hoist the tricolor flag, and proclaim the Hibernian Republic in close alliance with the Republic of France. With truth it may be said, that the fate of England then hung upon a thread. Napoleon, and the unconquered army of Italy, were still in Europe; a successful descent of the advanced guard, 15,000 strong, under Hoche, would immediately have been followed up by the invasion of the main body under that great leader; and the facility with which the French fleet reached Bantry Bay in February 1797, where they were only prevented from landing by tempestuous gales, proves that the command of the seas cannot always be relied on as a security against foreign invasion. Had 40,000 French soldiers landed at that time in Ireland, to organise 200,000 hot-headed Catholic democrats, and lend the hand of fraternity to their numerous coadjutors on the other side of St George's Channel, it is difficult to say what would have been the present fate of England.

"The rebellion of 1798 threw back for ten years the progress of the indulgent measures so long practised towards Ireland. But at length the spirit of clemency again resumed its sway; the system of concession was again adopted, and the last remnants of the Irish fetters removed by the liberal Tory administration of England. First, the Catholics were declared eligible to any situations in the army and navy; and at length, by the famous Relief Bill, the remaining distinctions between Catholic and Protestant were done away, and an equal share of political influence was extended to them as that of their Protestant brethren. What has been the consequence? Has Ireland increased in tranquillity since this memorable change? Have the prophecies of its advocates been verified, as to the stilling of the waves of dissension and rebellion? Has it proved true, as Earl Grey prophesied it would, in his place in the House of Lords,

Defluit saxis agitatus humor;
Concedunt venti, fugiuntque nubes;
Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto
Unda recumbit?

"The reverse of all this has notoriously been the case. Since this last and great concession, Ireland has become worse than ever. Midnight conflagration, dastardly assassination, have spread with fearful rapidity; the sources of justice have been dried up, and the most atrocious criminals repeatedly suffered to escape, from the impossibility of bringing them to justice. A universal insurrection against the payment of tithes has defied all the authority of Government, in open violation of the solemn promises of the Catholics that no invasion on the rights of the Protestant church was intended; and the starving clergy of Ireland have been thrown as a burden upon the consolidated fund of England. At this moment the authority of England is merely nominal over the neighbouring island; the Lord Lieutenant is less generally obeyed than the great Agitator, and the dictates of the Catholic leaders are looked up to in preference to the acts of the British Parliament. In despair at so desperate a state of things, so entirely the reverse of all they had hoped from the long train of conciliatory measures, the English are giving up the cause in despair; while the great and gallant body of Irish Protestants are firmly looking the danger in the face, and silently preparing for the struggle which they well know has now become inevitable.

"The result of experience, therefore, is complete in all its parts. Thrice, during the last two hundred years, have conciliatory measures been tried on the largest scale, and with the most beneficent intention; and thrice have the concessions to the Catholics been followed by a violent and intolerable outbreak of savage ferocity. The two first rebellions were followed by a firm and severe system of coercive government; as long as they continued in force, Ireland was comparatively tranquil, and their relaxation was the signal for the commencement of a state of insubordination which rapidly led to anarchy and revolt. The present revolutionary spirit has been met by a different system. Every thing has been conceded to the demagogues; their demands have been granted, their assemblies allowed, their advice followed, their leaders promoted; and the country in consequence has arrived at a state of anarchy unparalleled in any Christian state.

"What makes the present state of Ireland, and the democratic spirit of its inhabitants, altogether unpardonable is, the extreme indulgence and liberality with which, for the last fifty years, they have been treated by this country. During the whole war, Ireland paid neither income-tax nor assessed taxes; and the sum thus made a present of by England to her people, amounted at the very lowest calculation to £50,000,000 sterling. She shared in the full benefit of the war in consequence of the immense extent of the demand for agricultural produce which its expenditure occasioned, without feeling any of the burdens which neutralised its extension in this country. No poor's rates are levied on her landholders—in other words, they are levied on England and Scotland instead—and this island is in consequence overwhelmed by a mass of indigence created in the neighbouring kingdom, but which British indulgence has relieved them from the necessity of maintaining. The amount of the sums annually paid by the Parliament of Great Britain to objects of charity and utility in Ireland almost exceeds belief, and is at least five times greater than all directed to the same objects in both the other parts of the empire taken together. Yet with all their good deeds, past, present, and to come, Ireland is the most discontented part of the United Kingdom. She is incessantly crying out against her benefactor, and recurring to old oppression rendered necessary by her passions, instead of present benefactions, of which her democratic population have proved themselves unworthy by their ingratitude.

"Notwithstanding all the efforts of her demagogues to distract the country, and counteract all the liberality and beneficence of the English Government, Ireland has advanced with greater rapidity in industry, wealth, and all the real sources of happiness, during the last thirty years, than any other part of the empire. Since the Union, she has made a start both in agricultural and manufacturing industry, quite unparalleled, and much greater than Scotland had made during the first hundred years after her incorporation with the English dominions. It is quite evident that, if the demagogues would let Ireland alone—if the wounds in her political system were not continually kept open, and the passions of the people incessantly inflamed, by her popular leaders, she would become as rich and prosperous as she is populous—that, instead of a source of weakness, she would become a pillar of strength to the united empire—and instead of being overspread with the most wretched and squalid population in Europe, she might eventually boast of the most contented and happy."

So far what we wrote in December 1832. We make no apology for the length of this quotation. So precisely is it applicable to the present time, that were we to write anew on the subject, we should certainly reproduce the same ideas, and probably, in a great degree, make use of the same words. It affords a remarkable proof of the manner in which Ireland has been influenced, in all periods of its history, by the same causes; and of the way in which all its natural advantages have been thrown away, by the indolence and want of energy in its inhabitants, joined to the unhappy extension to it, through British connexion, of the privileges, excitement, and passions, consequent on a free constitution, for which it was unfitted by its character, temperament, and state of social advancement.

Need it be said how precisely the same truths have been illustrated in later times, and, most of all, in the memorable year in which we now write? The melancholy tale is known to all: it is written in characters of fire in England's annals. Such was the state of excitement, anarchy, and licentiousness to which the Irish were brought under the Whig rule, by the combined operation of the Reform mania, and the Repeal agitation, that Lord Grey, albeit the most impassioned opponent of Mr Pitt's preventive policy, was compelled to adopt it; and the celebrated Coercion Bill of 1833 invested Government with extraordinary powers, and for a time superseded, by martial law, in some districts of Ireland, the ordinary administration of justice. The result, as much as the anarchy which had preceded it, demonstrated where the secret of Ireland's ills was to be found, and what was the species of government adapted for its unsettled, impassioned, and semi-barbarous inhabitants.[13] Instantly, as if by enchantment, the disorders ceased: midnight fires no longer illuminated the heavens, midnight murders no longer struck terror into the inhabitants. The savage passions of the people, growing out of the civilised license unhappily allowed them under British rule, were rapidly coerced, and, instead of Ireland exhibiting an amount of agrarian outrage and atrocity unprecedented in any Christian land, even her worst provinces returned to their usual, though yet serious and lamentable average.[14]

The evil days of conciliation and concession, however, soon returned. When Sir R. Peel assumed the helm for a brief period in 1835, he said, that his chief difficulty was Ireland. It was so in truth—not from the difficulties, great as they were, with which the administration of Ireland was surrounded, but from the monstrous delusions on the subject with which the Whigs, then possessed of the chief influence in the state, had imbued the public mind. So feeble was Government under his successors, from 1835 to 1841—so thoroughly had they drenched the people of Great Britain with the belief that severity of rule was the sole cause of the miseries of Ireland, and that conciliation and concession were their appropriate remedy—that powers the most disastrous, privileges the most undeserved, were bestowed on the Irish people. The very agitators were lauded, flattered, and promoted. O'Connell was offered a seat on the Bench; the whole, or nearly the whole, patronage of the country was surrendered into his hands. The greater part of the police were nominated according to the suggestions of himself or his party; the Orangemen of the north—the bulwark of the throne—were vilified, prosecuted, and discouraged; self-government became the order of the day; municipal reform was conceded; an ignorant, priest-led, half-savage people were intrusted with one of the highest duties of civilised citizens—that of electing their own magistrates. O'Connell, under the new municipal constitution, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin; a majority, both of the constituency and members of Parliament, ere long became Repealers. The Whig system of governing Ireland, by yielding to its selfish passions and fostering its political vices, received its full development; Whig journals, reviews, and magazines, lauded the policy to the skies, and predicted from its effects the speedy removal of all the evils which had arisen from the Tory system of coercion and repression in the Emerald Isle.

The results were soon apparent. Assured of countenance and support from high quarters—cordially supported by the Popish hierarchy and priesthood—intrenched, beyond the power of assault, in almost all the boroughs—possessed of considerable support or connivance in the rural magistracy—backed, in many parts of the country, by the torch of the incendiary or the firelock of the assassin—wielding at once the delegated powers of Government, the daggers of desperadoes, the enthusiasm of the people, O'Connell proceeded with the step of a conqueror in the work of agitation. The Temperance movement, headed by Father Mathew, came most opportunely to aid its funds, by diverting the vast sums hitherto spent by the people on physical, to support the cause of mental agitation. Seventy temperance bands were soon established to head the temperance clubs; the uniforms of the musicians were so made, that, by being merely turned, they could be converted into the bands of so many regiments; the Rent flourished; whisky-shops were ruined; the grand Intoxicator demolished his inferior competitors; Conciliation Hall boasted of its three thousand pounds a-week! The distilleries were bankrupt. The simple, misled people of England believed that, under the combined influence of political agitation, municipal reform, and suddenly-induced sobriety, Ireland was to be effectually regenerated, and the Celt was at once to leap into the privileges of the Saxon, without going through his seven centuries of painful apprenticement. Monster meetings became general. Assemblages said to consist of eighty or a hundred thousand, and which really contained twenty or thirty thousand persons, were held in the whole south and west of Ireland. Meanwhile industry was paralysed; capital shunned the agitated shores; labour was diverted from the field to the platform; the earnings of the poor were wrenched from them, by priestly influence and the terrors of purgatory, to aid in the great work of dismembering the empire. Instead of attending to their business—instead of working at their lazy-beds or tending their cattle—instead of draining their bogs or reclaiming their wastes, the people were continually kept running about from one monster meeting to another, and taught to believe that they were to look for happiness, not through the labour of their hands, or the sweat of their brows, but in swelling seditious processions, listening to treasonable harangues, and extending the ramifications of a vast and atrocious Ribbon conspiracy throughout Ireland.

Society could not long exist under such a system; but it was long ere the Liberal party saw the error of their ways—when Sir Robert Peel's government, in 1843, at length became convinced that the evil had come to such a height that it could no longer be endured, and that society would be dissolved under its influence. The meeting, accordingly, at Clontarff was proclaimed down; O'Connell was prosecuted, and a conviction obtained. But the Whigs were not long of coming up to the rescue. A majority of three Whig law peers to two Conservative ones—Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham being in the minority—overruled the opinion of the twelve judges of England, and quashed the prosecution. Elated with this victory, agitation resumed its sway in Ireland; but it did so under darker auspices, and with more dangerous ends. Organisation, with a view to insurrection, was now avowedly set on foot; arms were purchased in large quantities; and the Whig Secretary of Ireland had the extreme imprudence to write a letter, which found its way into the public prints, and was soon placarded over Ireland, in which it was stated generally, and without qualification, that every Irishman was entitled to possess and carry arms. Nay, this was made the cheval de bataille between the two parties; and when Sir R. Peel was turned out in July 1846, it was on the question of the bill for prohibiting the possession of arms in Ireland. The Whigs came into power on the basis of the Irish peasantry being entitled to be armed. It covers, like charity, a multitude of sins in Sir R. Peel, that he left office on the same question.

But the laws of nature are more durable in their operation than the revolutions of statesmen. The effects of twenty years' agitation and disorder in Ireland ere long became apparent. The reign of murder, incendiarism, and terror, brought down an awful retribution on its authors. Agriculture, neglected for the more agreeable and gainful trade of agitation or assassination, had fallen into such neglect, that the land, in many parts of the country, had become incapable of bearing grain crops. Nothing would do but lazy-beds, in which often a wretched crop was raised in the centre of the ridge, on a third of the land, while the remaining two-thirds were under water. The potato famine came, in 1846, upon a country thus prepared for such a visitation—wasted by agitation, disgraced by murder, impoverished by the protracted reign of terror. Its effects are well known. Ireland, wholly incapable, from its infatuated system of self-government, of doing any thing for itself, fell entirely as a burden on England. Great part of Scotland was wasted by a similar calamity, and in regions—the West Highlands and Islands—far more sterile and barren than the south and west of Ireland. But Scotland had not been torn by political passions, nor palsied by repeal agitation. Scotland righted itself. It bore the visitation with patience and resignation. It neither sought nor received aid from England. Not a shilling was advanced by the Exchequer to relieve Scotch suffering. Ten millions were given by the nation to relieve that of Ireland: of this immense sum eight millions were borrowed, and remain a lasting charge on Great Britain. Hundreds of thousands, raised from the suffering and won by the labour of England and Scotland, followed in the same direction. In return, the Irish gave us contumely, defiance, and ingratitude. The Nation thundered forth weekly its fiendish vituperation against the people who had saved its countrymen. It was eagerly read by hundreds of thousands who owed their existence to British generosity. The beggar gave place to the bully. Great part of the funds, lavished with misplaced humanity on Irish suffering, was employed in the purchase of arms to destroy their benefactors; and the unparalleled munificence of England to Ireland in 1847, was succeeded by the unparalleled rebellion of Ireland against England in 1848.

He must be blind indeed who cannot read in this rapid summary the real causes of the long-continued misery and distraction of Ireland. It has arisen in a great degree from English connexion, but in a way which the Irish do not perceive, and which they will be the last to admit. It is all owing to a very simple cause—so simple that philosophers have passed it over as too obvious to explain the phenomena, and party-men have rejected it because it afforded no handle for popular declamation, and gave them no fulcrum whereon to rest the lever which was to remove an opposite party from power. It is not owing to the Roman Catholic religion,—for, if so, how have so many Roman Catholic countries been, and still are, great, and powerful, and happy? It is not owing to the confiscation of the land, for confiscation as great followed the establishment of the Normans in England, and the victories of Robert Bruce in Scotland; and yet, in process of time, the ghastly wound was healed in both these countries, and from the united effort of the Britons, Saxons, and North-men, have arisen the glories and wonders of British civilisation. It is not owing to the exclusion, from 1608 to 1829, of the Roman Catholics from Parliament; for, since they were admitted into it, the distractions of Ireland have gone on constantly increasing, and its pauperism and mendicancy have advanced in an accelerated ratio. It is entirely owing to this,—that England has given Ireland institutions and political franchises, for the exercise of which it is wholly disqualified by temperament, habit, and political advancement. We have put edged tools into the hands of children, and we are astonished that they have mangled their limbs. We have emancipated from necessary control the Bedouin or the savage, and we are disappointed he does not exercise his newly-acquired powers with the discretion of an Englishman or an American. We have plunged a youth of sixteen, without control, into the dissipation of London or Paris, and we are surprised he has run riot in excess. Thence it is that all the concessions made to Ireland have instantly and rapidly augmented its political maladies, and that the only intervals of rest, tranquillity, and happiness it has enjoyed for the last two hundred years, have been those in which it has for a brief period been coerced by the wholesome severity of vigorous government. Thence it is that Whig solicitude, fastening on the grievances of Ireland as its battle-field, and winning for the inhabitants privileges for which they are not fitted, has in every instance so grievously augmented its wretchedness and crimes. This is the true key to Irish history. Viewed in this light, it is perfectly clear, intelligible, and consistent with what has occurred in other parts of the world. Without such guidance, its annals exhibit a chaos of contradictions; and Ireland must be considered as a casus singularis—an exception from the principles which elsewhere have ever regulated mankind.

The whole machinery of a free constitution—those institutions under which the Anglo-Saxons have so long flourished on both sides the Atlantic—are utter destruction to the semi-barbarous Celtic race to which they have been extended. Grand juries and petty juries, self-governments, municipalities, county and burgh elections, popular representatives, public meetings, hustings' declarations, platform exaggerations, a licentious press, and all the other attendants on republican or semi-republican institutions, are utterly destructive to the impassioned, priest-ridden, ignorant Celtic tribes in the south and west of Ireland. A paternal despotism is what they require.

We are far from wishing that despotism to be severe—on the contrary, we would have it beneficent and humane in the highest degree—we would have it give to Ireland blessings tenfold greater than it will ever earn for itself in senseless attempts at self-government. We would commence the work by the grant of sixteen millions of British money, to set on foot the chief arteries and railroads of the country!—that grant which, proposed by the patriotic wisdom of Lord George Bentinck, was defeated by the insane resistance of the Irish members themselves.[15] We would in every imaginable shape stimulate the industry of Ireland, and aid the efforts of its really patriotic children, to extricate their country from the bottomless gulf into which selfishness, agitation, and the cry for repeal, have plunged it. But we would intrust little of this grant to the distribution of the Irish themselves. We would not again be guilty of the enormous error of committing a magnificent public grant to hands so unfit to direct it, that we know from the highest authority—that of the Lord-lieutenant himself—that great part of the fund was misapplied in private jobbing, and the remainder wasted in making good roads bad ones. We would execute the works by Irish hands, but distribute the funds, and guide the undertakings, by English heads. We would deprive the Irish, till they have shown they are fit to wield its powers, of the whole rights of self-government. We would commence with a rigorous and unflinching administration of justice, executed by courts-martial in cases of insurrection, and by judges without juries in ordinary cases. A powerful police, double its present strength, should give security to witnesses, who, if they desire it, should be provided with an asylum in the colonies at the public expense. "Every thing for the people, and nothing by them," which Napoleon described as the real principle of government at all times, should be applied to Ireland at least during the many years still to run of its national pupilage and minority.

The truth of these principles has been so signally demonstrated by the events of which Ireland has recently, and we lament to say is still, the theatre, that it has at length forced itself on the mind of the English people. Most fortunately, the Whigs being in power themselves, and having the responsibility and duties of government thrown upon them, have at length come to see the matter in its true light. The cry that all is owing to English misrule, is no longer heard in Great Britain. Its utter falsehood has been demonstrated in language too clear to be misunderstood. Even the Liberal journals, who have shown themselves most earnest in promoting the cause of reform and self-government in Great Britain, have come to see how utterly it is misapplied when attempted in Ireland. Hear the Times on this subject, one of the ablest journals which formerly supported the cause of parliamentary and municipal reform, as well in Ireland as in this country.

"The slowly gathering wrath of years has been concentrated to a point. John Bull was—as Jonathan would express it—"properly riled" at the behaviour of his once beloved fondling. He could put up with ingratitude; he could despise insolence; he could treat bravado with contempt. But here was the most wonderful combination of insolence, ingratitude, bravado, and cowardice, that history has recorded. Here were men belching out treason and fire and sword one day, and the next day sneaking between the bulwarks of a cabbage-garden, or through the loopholes of an indictment! For such, and on such, had he been expending, not only money, but care, anxiety, sympathy, and fear. He was fooled in the eyes of the world and his own! The only hope for Ireland is in rest, and a strong Government. Almost every Englishman who has regarded her with solicitude within late years, is convinced that what she and her people require, beyond all things, is discipline. Her gentry require discipline; her middle classes require discipline; her peasantry require discipline. They should altogether be disciplined in a rigid but just system, as the picked Irishmen have been who are distinguished as the best foremen in our factories, and the best non-commissioned officers in our army. Political privileges have been tried and misused; judicial forms have been tried and abused; Saxon institutions have been tried, and found not to harmonise with the Celtic mind. It cannot comprehend them; it does not appreciate them. It arrays liberty against law, and the technicalities of law against its spirit. It wants that moral sense, that instinctive justice and fairness, which have been the soul and the strength of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. This it must be taught by a strong, an irresistible, and, if need be, a coercive authority. Duty must be impressed on it as a habit, and then it will be inanealed with its sympathies. The greatest boon to Ireland would be the rule of a benevolent autocrat, who would punish all classes and all parties alike for a breach of social and civil duties—the landlords for their cruelty, the tenants for their mendacity, the priests for their neglect of their most momentous function. This boon Ireland will not get; but we can force upon her that which comes the nearest to it, the suppression of a vain, vapid, selfish, and suicidal agitation. If we do not do it while we may, we shall rue it with bitterness and humiliation hereafter."—Times, September 1847.

To the same purpose, it is observed in a late number of the Economist, also an able Liberal journal:

"Irish agitation has run its course, and shown its character. It has had 'rope enough' allowed to manifest what are its materials, and what its means—what are the objects it proposes, and of what stuff its leaders are made. It has displayed a mixture of ferocity, levity, and incapacity, which has covered with shame and confusion all its quondam sympathisers and admirers. Demagogism has been stripped naked, and has appeared as what it really is—a low, savage, dishonest enormity—an 'evil that walketh in darkness'—the epidemic malady of Ireland—an enemy which no concessions can conciliate, which no mildness can disarm, and with which, because of its dishonesty, no parley can be held.

"An open rebellion has been crushed at its first outbreak. A number of its leaders and organisers are in prison, and the Government, with a forbearance and adhesion to routine ideas which verges on the simple, and almost approaches the sublime, intrusts their punishment to the slow and uncertain processes of the law—to the courage of Irish juries, and the integrity of Irish witnesses. The Government allows rebels who have appealed to arms, and been worsted in the conflict, to retreat behind the shelter of the law. It is content to meet an armament with an indictment; nay, more, it is content to submit this indictment to the judgment of men, half of whom are in the ranks of the rebel army, and the other half in its power. It may have been well to try this hazardous experiment; but the result of it could not long be doubtful. Accordingly, we find that convictions cannot be obtained. Rebels, whose guilt is as clear as the day, are dismissed from the dock because juries will not agree upon a verdict—and are to be kept safe till March 1849, then to be let loose to recommence their work of mischief with all the increased audacity which impunity cannot fail to generate. They have taken arms against the Government, and the Government will have proved impotent to punish them.

"We are not surprised that Irish juries will not convict Irish rebels. It is too much to expect that they should do so, even when fully convinced of, and indignant at, their guilt. It would be almost too much to ask from Englishmen. Government have a right to call upon jurors to do their duty, under ordinary circumstances and in ordinary times. In like manner, Government has a right to call upon all citizens to come forward, and act as special constables, in all cases of civil commotion. But it has no right to send them forth, unexercised and unarmed, to encounter an organised and disciplined force, provided with musket and artillery: that is the business of regular troops. In like manner, Government has no right to expect jurors to act at the hazard of their lives and property. The law never contemplated that serving on a jury should be an office of danger. When it becomes such, other agencies must be brought into operation.

"It will not suffice to the Government to have acted with such skill and spirit as to have rendered abortive a formidable and organised rebellion. It must crush the rebellious spirit and the rebellious power. This can never be done by the means of juries. Punishment, to be effectual, must fall with unerring certainty on every one concerned in the crime. They must be made to feel that no legal chicanery, no illegitimate sympathy, can avail to save them. The British nation, we are sure, will never endure that men who have been guilty of such crimes as the Irish felons should escape punishment, and be again let loose on society, to mock and gibe at the impotence of power. Any termination of the crisis would be preferable to one so fatal and disgraceful."—Economist, Sept. 12, 1848.

These articles, emanating from such sources, induce us to hope that the long-protracted distractions of Ireland are about to be brought to a close; and that, after having been for above half a century the battle-field of English faction, or cursed with Liberal English sympathy, and its inevitable offspring, Irish agitation and mendacity—the real secret of its sufferings has been brought to light; and that, by being governed in a manner suitable to its character and circumstances, it will at length take its place among the really civilised nations of the world, and become fit for the exercise of those privileges which, prematurely conceded, have proved its ruin.

One circumstance induces the hope that this anticipation maybe realised, and that is, the highly honourable part which the Irish enrolled in the police have taken in the late disturbances; the fidelity of all the Irish in the Queen's service to their colours; and the general pacific conduct which has, with a few exceptions, been observed by the numerous Hibernians settled in Great Britain during the late disturbances. The conduct of the Irish police, in particular, has been in all respects admirable; and it is net going too far to assert, that to their zeal, activity, and gallantry, the almost bloodless suppression of the insurrection is mainly to be ascribed. The British army does not boast a more courageous body of men than the Irishmen in its ranks; and it is well known that, after a time, they form the best officers of a superior kind for all the police establishments in the kingdom. Although the Irish in our great towns are often a very great burden, especially when they first come over, from the vast number of them who are in a state of mendicity, and cannot at first get into any regular employment, yet when they do obtain it, they prove hardworking and industrious, and do not exhibit a greater proportion of crime than the native British with whom they are surrounded. The Irish quickness need be told to none who have witnessed the running fire of repartee they keep up from the fields with travellers, how rapid soever, on the road; their genius is known to all who are familiar with the works of Swift and Goldsmith, of Burke and Berkeley. Of one thing only at present they are incapable, and that is, self-government. One curse, and one curse only, has hitherto blasted all their efforts at improvement, and that is, the abuse of freedom. One thing, and one thing only, is required to set them right, and that is, the strong rule suited to national pupilage. One thing, and one thing only, is required to complete their ruin, and that is, repeal and independence. An infallible test will tell us when they have become prepared for self-government, and that is, when they have ceased to hate the Saxon—when they adopt his industry, imitate his habits, and emulate his virtues.

We have spoken of the French and the Irish, and contrasted, not without some degree of pride, their present miserable and distracted state with the steady and pacific condition of Great Britain, during a convulsion which has shaken the civilised world to its foundation. But let it not be supposed that France and Ireland alone have grievances which require redress, erroneous policy which stands in need of rectification. England has its full share of suffering, and more than its deserved share of absurd and pernicious legislation. But it is the glory of this country that we can rectify these evils by the force of argument steadily applied, and facts sedulously brought forward, without invoking the destructive aid of popular passions or urban revolutions. We want neither Red Republicans nor Tipperary Boys to fight our battles; we neither desire to be intrenched behind Parisian barricades nor Irish non-convicting juries; we neither want the aid of Chartist clubs, with their arsenals of rifles, nor Anti-corn-law Leagues, with their coffers of gold. We appeal to the common sense and experienced suffering of our countrymen—to the intellect and sense of justice of our legislators; and we have not a doubt of ultimate success in the greatest social conflict in which British industry has ever been engaged.

We need not say that we allude to the Currency—that question of questions, in comparison of which all others sink into insignificance; which is of more importance, even, than an adequate supply of food for the nation; and without the proper understanding of which all attempts to assuage misery or produce prosperity, to avert disaster or induce happiness, to maintain the national credit or uphold the national independence, must ere long prove nugatory. We say, and say advisedly, that this question is of far more importance than the raising of food for the nation; for if their industry is adequately remunerated, and commercial catastrophes are averted from the realm, the people will find food for themselves either in this or foreign states. Experience has taught us that we can import twelve millions of grain, a full fifth of the national subsistence, in a single year. But if the currency is not put upon a proper footing, the means of purchasing this grain are taken from the people—their industry is blasted, their labour meets with no reward—and the most numerous and important class in the community come to present the deplorable spectacle of industrious worth perishing of hunger, or worn out by suffering, in the midst of accumulated stores of home-grown or foreign subsistence.

The two grand evils of the present monetary system are, that the currency provided for the nation is inadequate in point of amount, and fluctuating in point of stability.

That it is inadequate in point of amount is easily proved. In the undermentioned years, the aggregate of notes in circulation in England and Wales, without Scotland and Ireland, was as follows[16]:—

Including the Scotch and Irish notes, at that period about £12,000,000, the notes in circulation were about £60,000,000, and the inhabitants of Great Britain 14,000,000; of the two islands about 19,000,000—or about £3, 4s. a head.

In the year 1848, thirty years afterwards, when the population of the empire had risen to 29,000,000, the exports had tripled, and the imports and shipping had on an average more than doubled, the supply of paper issued to the nation stood thus:—

Thus showing a decrease of £1,322,952 in the circulation of notes in England, and a decrease of £2,526,611 in the circulation of the United Kingdom, when compared with the corresponding period last year.[17]—Times, Aug. 29, 1848.

Thus, in the last thirty years, the population of Great Britain and Ireland has increased from 19,000,000 to 29,500,000; while its currency in paper has decreased from £60,000,000 to £32,000,000. Above fifty per cent has been added to the people, and above a hundred per cent to their transactions, and the currency by which they are to be carried on has been contracted fifty per cent. Thirty years ago, the paper currency was £3, 5s. a head; now it is not above £1, 5s. a head! And our statesmen express surprise at the distress which prevails, and the extreme difficulty experienced in collecting the revenue! It is no wonder, in such a state of matters, that it is now more difficult to collect £52,000,000 from 29,000,000 of people, than in 1814 it was to collect £72,000,000 from 18,000,000.

The circulation, it is particularly to be observed, is decreasing every year. It was, in August 1848, no less than £2,500,000 less than it was in August 1847, though that was the August between the crisis of April and the crisis of October of that year. And this prodigious and progressively increasing contraction of the currency, and consequent drying up of credit and blasting of industry, is taking place at the precise time when the very legislators who have produced it have landed the nation in the expenditure, in three years, of £150,000,000 on domestic railways, independent of a vast and increasing import trade, which is constantly draining more and more of our metallic resources out of the country! Need it be wondered at that money is so tight, and that railway stock in particular exhibits, week after week, a progressive and most alarming decline.

But, say the bullionists, if we have taken away one-half of your paper, we have given you double the former command of sovereigns; and gold is far better than paper, because it is of universal and permanent value. There can be no doubt that the gold and silver coinage at the Mint has been very much augmented since paper was so much withdrawn; and the amount in circulation now probably varies in ordinary times from £40,000,000 to £45,000,000. There can be as little doubt that the circulation, on its present basis, is capable of fostering and permitting the most unlimited amount of speculations; for absurd adventures never were so rife in the history of England, not even in the days of the South Sea Company, as in 1845, the year which immediately followed Sir R. Peel's new currency measures, by which these dangers were to be for ever guarded against. It is no wonder it was so; for the bill of 1844 aggravates speculation as much in periods of prosperity, as it augments distress and pinches credit in times of adversity. By compelling the Bank of England, and all other banks, to hold constantly in their coffers a vast amount of treasure, which must be issued at a fixed price, it leaves them no resource for defraying its charges but pushing business, and getting out their notes to the uttermost. That was the real secret of the lowering of the Bank of England's discounts to 3 and 2-1/2 per cent in 1845, and of the enormous gambling speculations of that year, from the effects of which the nation is still so severely suffering.

But as gold is made, under the new system, the basis of the circulation beyond the £32,000,000 allowed to be issued in the United Kingdom on securities, what provision does it make for keeping the gold thus constituted the sole basis of two-thirds of the currency within the country? Not only is no such provision made, but every imaginable facility is given for its exportation. Under the free-trade system, our imports are constantly increasing in a most extraordinary ratio, and our exports constantly diminishing. Since 1844, our imports have swelled from £75,000,000 to £90,000,000, while our exports have decreased from £60,000,000 to £58,000,000, of which only £51,000,000 are British and Irish exports and manufactures.[18] How is the balance paid, or to be paid? In cash: and that is the preparation which our legislators have made for keeping the gold, the life-blood of industry and the basis of two-thirds of the circulation, in the country. They have established a system of trade which, by inducing a large and constant importation of food, for which scarcely any thing but gold will be taken, induces a constant tendency of the precious metals outwards. With the right hand they render the currency and credit beyond £32,000,000 entirely dependent on keeping the gold in the country, and with the left hand they send it headlong out of the country to buy grain. No less than £33,000,000 were sent out in this way to buy grain in fifteen months during and immediately preceding the year 1847. They do this at the very time when, under bills which themselves have passed, and the railways which themselves have encouraged, £150,000,000 was in the next three years to be expended on the extra work of railways! Is it surprising that, under such a system, half the wealth of our manufacturing towns has disappeared in two years; that distress to an unheard-of extent prevails every where; and that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been obliged to borrow £10,000,000, in the last and present session of Parliament, during general peace?

Let it not be supposed this evil has passed away. It is in full vigour at the present moment. It will never pass away as long as free trade and a fettered currency coexist in this country. The disastrous fact has been revealed by the publication of the Board of Trade returns, that while, during the first six months of this year, our imports have undergone little diminution, our exports have sunk £4,000,000 below the corresponding months in last year. In May alone, the decrease was £1,122,000; in April, £1,467,000.[19] Beyond all doubt our exports, this year, of British produce and manufactures, will sink to £45,000,000, while our imports will reach at least £85,000,000! How is the balance paid? In Specie! And still the monetary laws remain the same, and for every five sovereigns above £32,000,000 lent out, a note must be drawn in! It may be doubted whether a system so utterly absurd and ruinous ever was established in any nation, or persevered in with such obstinacy after its pernicious effects had been ascertained by experience.

The manner in which these disastrous effects resulted, necessarily and immediately, from the combined operation of the bills of 1819 and 1844, is thus clearly and justly stated by Mr Salt, in his late admirable letter to Sir R. Peel on the subject.

"The potato crop failed, and an importation of food became necessary; the food was imported at a cost not exceeding one half per cent on the national wealth. It might have been paid for in goods or in gold, and the limit of the loss would have been the amount paid—a sum too insignificant, compared to the national resources, to have been perceptible—and the national industry could have replaced it in a few weeks.

"But the bill of 1819 had made gold the basis of our whole system; and, therefore, when the gold was exported to pay for the food, the whole system was broken up; and the bill provides that this calamity shall in every case be added to that of a bad harvest; that the abstraction of an infinitesimal part of our money shall destroy our whole monetary system; that the purchase of a small quantity of food shall cause an immense quantity of starvation, by destroying the means of distributing the food, and employing labour. If this were the only evil of the bill, its existence ought not to be tolerated an hour.

"Instead of placing the national credit and solvency on the broad and indestructible basis of the national industry and wealth, you have placed all the great national interest on gold, the narrowest and most shifting, and therefore the most unfit, basis it was possible to choose. You could not have done worse.

"The gold being in quantity perfectly unequal to effect the exchanges needful for the existence of society, an immense and disproportioned superstructure of paper money and credit became a compulsory result, and a certain cause of perpetually recurring ruin.

"In framing the bill of 1819 you do not appear to have had a suspicion of this consequence; but in 1844, after an interval of a quarter of a century, this much seems to have dawned obscurely in your mind; but, alas! what was your remedy?—enlarging and securing the too narrow and shifting basis? Not at all; you crippled and limited the superstructure. You left us subject to the whole of your original error, and provided a new one!

"The bill of 1844 provides that, in proportion as the gold money shall disappear, the paper money shall disappear also! Out of the money thus doubly reduced, the unhappy people are compelled to pay unreduced taxes; and out of the inadequate remnant to discharge unreduced debts, and to provide for the unreduced necessities of their respective stations. So the leaven of the law works its way through all society. The payments cannot be made out of these reduced means, the loss of the credit follows the loss of the money; the means of exchange, employment, and consumption are destroyed, and the world looks with amazement on the consummation of your work—the wealthiest nation in the world withering up under the blight of a universal insolvency; an abundance of all things beyond compute, and a misery and want beyond relief.

"The sole aim of your bill has been to convert paper money into gold. I have shown how signally you have failed in this one object, always excepting your special claim of converting £48,000,000 of paper money into £15,000,000 of gold, for which mutation I suspect few will thank you. In all other respects, the whimsicality of your fate has been to establish a universal inconvertibility. Labour cannot be converted into wages, East India estates, West India estates, railway shares, sugar, rice, cotton goods, &c.; in short, all things are inconvertible except gold. There has been nothing like it since the days of Midas.

"The facts, sir, are of your creation, not of mine. I cannot alter or disguise them. You have had confided to your administration, by our illustrious sovereign, this most powerful state, of almost unlimited extent and fertility—a people unrivalled in their knowledge, caution, skill, and energy, possessed of unlimited means of creating wealth, and out of all these elements of human happiness your measures have produced a chaos of ruin, misery, and discontent. You can scarcely place your finger on the map, and mark a spot in this vast empire where all the elements of prosperity do not exist abundantly; you cannot point out one where you have not produced results of ruin. Every resource is paralysed, every interest deranged; the very empire is threatened with dissolution. The Canadas, the West Indies, and Ireland, are threatening secession, and England has to be garrisoned against its people as against a hostile force; the very loyalty of English hearts is beginning to turn into disaffection. Review once more these vast resources, and these wretched results, and I trust you will not make the fatal opinion of your life the only one to which you will persist in adhering."

This is language at once fearless, but measured—cutting, but respectful, which, on such an emergency, befits a British statesman. There is no appeal to popular passions, no ascribing of unworthy motives, no attempt to evade inquiry by irony; facts, known undeniable facts, are alone appealed to. Inferences, clear, logical, convincing, are alone drawn. If such language was more frequent, especially in the House of Commons, the plague would soon be stayed, and its former prosperity would again revisit the British Empire.

In opposition to these damning facts, the whole tactics of the bullionists consist in recurring to antiquated and childish terrors. They call out "Assignats, assignats, assignats!"—they seek to alarm every holder of money by the dread of its depreciation. They affect to treat the doctrine of keeping a fair proportion between population, engagements, and currency, as a mere chimera. In the midst of the deluge, they raise the cry of fire; when wasting of famine, they hold out to us the terrors of repletion; when sinking from atrophy on the way-side, they strive to terrify us by the dangers of apoplexy. The answer to all this tissue of affectation and absurdity is so evident, that we are almost ashamed to state it. We all know the dangers of assignats; we know that they are ruinous when issued to any great extent. So also we know the dangers of apoplexy and intoxication; but we are not on that account reconciled to a regimen of famine and starvation. We know that some of the rich die of repletion, but we know that many more of the poor die of want and wretchedness. We do not want to be deluged with inconvertible paper, which has been truly described as "strength in the outset, but weakness in the end;" but neither do we desire to be starved by the periodical abstraction of that most evanescent of earthly things, a gold circulation. Having the means, from our own immense accumulated wealth, of enjoying that first of social blessings, an adequate, steady, and safe currency, we do not wish to be any longer deprived of it by the prejudices of theorists, the selfishness of capitalists, or the obstinacy of statesmen. Half our wealth, engaged in trade and manufactures, has already disappeared, under this system, in two years; we have no disposition to lose the remaining half.

The duty on wheat now is only five shillings a quarter; in February next it will fall to one shilling a quarter, and remain fixed at that amount. The importation of grain, which was felt as so dreadful a drain upon our metallic resources in 1847, may, under that system, be considered as permanent. We shall be always in the condition in which the nation is when three weeks' rain has fallen in August. Let merchants, manufacturers, holders of funded property, of railway stock, of bank stock, reflect on that circumstance, and consider what fate awaits them if the present system remains unchanged. They know that three days' rain in August lowers the public funds one, and all railway stock ten per cent. Let them reflect on their fate if, by human folly, an effect equal to that of three weeks' continuous fall of rain takes place every year. Let them observe what frightful oscillations in the price of commodities follow the establishing by law a fixed price for gold. Let them ponder on the consequences of a system which sends twelve or fifteen millions of sovereigns out of the country annually to buy grain, and contracts the paper remaining in it at the same time in the same proportion. Let them observe the effect of such a system, coinciding with a vast expenditure on domestic railways. And let them consider whether all these dreadful evils, and the periodical devastation of the country by absurd speculation and succeeding ruin, would not be effectually guarded against, and the perils of an over-issue of paper also prevented, by the simple expedient of treating gold and silver, the most easily transported and evanescent of earthly things, like any other commodity, and making paper always payable in them, but at the price they bear at the moment of presentment. That would establish a mixed circulation of the precious metals and paper, mutually convertible, and allow an increased issue of the latter to obviate all the evils flowing from the periodical abstractions of the former. To establish the circulation on a gold basis alone, in a great commercial state, is the same error as to put the food of the people in a populous community on one root or species of grain. Ireland has shown us, in the two last years, what is the consequence of the one—famine and rebellion; England, of the other—bankruptcy and Chartism.