not like the publicans and sinners that fill all the rest of the world, is forced to admit, nay, bitterly to complain, that our wordy legislation is exceedingly barren of beneficial results.

Nearly all that is substantial in Irish society has sustained Lord Clarendon, in his efforts to maintain the peace of the country. In professing loyalty to the throne, men have said little of measures for allaying discontent, being unwilling to embarrass the government by drawing forth in reply declarations which might indicate weakness or shrinking. The friends of order felt that the first duty of all was to preserve society. Mr. Mitchel and his party were for destroying the machine, instead of putting it in better working order; for setting fire to the house, instead of repairing it. To prevent this great evil was the immediate duty of Lord Clarendon. It must have been painful to him to be the instrument of imperial coercion-to be set up as a dictator over a long-suffering nation. But few men could have performed such odious duties with so much wisdom and humanity. His popularity with the Orangemen and the revived ascendancy party, is but an accident of the sad position which has been forced upon him. We trust, however, that history will not have reason to rank him with the Camdens and Clares of the times that are past. We trust that victory in a contest so unequal will be marked with moderation; and that justice will be tempered with mercy. To punish vindictively, where a nation sympathizes with the felon, is to sow the seeds of still deeper hatred to the government; and to keep the cities of Ireland in a state of perpetual seige. We freely abandon the insurgent leaders to the ridicule which attends vain-glorious imbecility, and the infamy which covers defeated ambition. Once more, in Ireland, an intended revolution has become a crushed rebellion. That 'foul, dishonouring word' will be for ever associated with the ill-concerted and ill-starred movement of 1848. In this fact Toryism greatly rejoices-not because life and property have been saved in the sister island, but because reform may be checked and monopoly preserved. They ask for Ireland a military despotism-they tell us a permanent impression' must be made and that the Irish people must have terror to their hearts' content; and they remind us that Ireland never was so peaceable as during the era of the penal code.

Now we say nothing about the practicability of such a system of government of Ireland in these times. We appeal not to the fears or the interests of Englishmen ; we appeal to their justice and humanity-to their Christian equity. Have we, through our government—which is, at least, theoretically responsible to us-done to Ireland as we would be done by in like circumstances? Is it wise to persist in a course whose fruits have

been so bitter? We have no objection that the sister kingdom, now in the paroxysm of a fever, should be subjected to the hydropathic system, and tightly bound up in military blankets,— provided that, while the doctor labours to abate the fever, he takes care to draw out the peccant humours which have so long vitiated the constitution, and rendered disaffection to the government a chronic malady. All the old drugs of Toryism which still taint her blood should be effectually purged out; and then the patient should be at once admitted to the generous regimen of British rights and the bracing air of perfect freedom.

We must make allowance for Ireland's disadvantages. On her head were many curses. Conquest, confiscation, popery, persecution, came upon her together, in forms the most fatal to her virtue and her national life: all aggravated by an alien and jealous government. No other nation ever suffered such a terrible combination of the worst evils that can befall a community; and they have been working ruinously, with little mitigation, for many centuries. The penalties of conquest, and of the tyranny which it necessitates, are fearful and tremendous. Every one of the kingdoms converted into provinces of the Roman empire was utterly degraded by the yoke. Centuries of tutelage rendered them incapable of thinking and acting for themselves, and left them an easy prey to the barbarians. This tutelage found the Britons a race of brave and independent men; but with all its civilization, aided by Christianity, it left them like a parasite plant from which a tree has been torn away. Miserably conscious of their imbecility, they piteously craved the protection and masterdom of the Saxon heathens, and abjectly promised them any service they pleased to impose. By a law of nature, as sure as that which makes the life of plants dependent on sun and air, a nation ruled by the will of another nation becomes mentally, morally, socially degraded. Dependence on the will of another, even though it be a father, has the same effect on individuals. But if, instead of being a son, and feeling the influence of parental love softening his servitude, it be a neighbour whom you have captured and forced into your family, and compelled to serve you by the right of the strongest, the case is much worse. If any manhood remain in him, he will be rebellious, though you feed and clothe him well. But if ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-lodged, despised and reviled, loyalty is the last duty you ought to expect from him. If, when he grumbles and weeps over his fate, you indignantly ask him what he wants, he will instantly answer, Liberty! Let me go-let me go-and I will be your friend, and bless you for ever.'

More than half the evils of conquest are avoided, when the conquerors make the land which they subdue the seat of their

government, as the Normans did with England. In the course of ages, the two nations intermingle, and become one people. 'It is a very different thing,' says Mr. W. Chambers, when an invading host retires after it has inflicted the first dread blow, and leaves the country in a subjugated and denationalized condition. From that instant the people, no longer permitted or called on to think decisively for themselves, become gradually emaciated in mind, etiolated, like a plant deprived of light. Their noble faculties wither and die; while subserviency, and many base and pitiful passions take their place. By far the greater number of conquests have been of this permanently ruinous character.'

No race has been proof against the degrading influence of delegated government. Compare modern Germany with the brave Teutonic stock from which its people are descended:-Here, until the present year, were 'a hundred millions of people in a state of tutelage, stifling the recollection of a great name in the fumes of an odious narcotic; heard talking of liberty only at inglorious tavern brawls, and with every action watched over and regulated by a crew of moustached barbarians.' The American colonies are apt illustrations. These are worthless and expensive to the mother country, just in proportion to their want of self-government. And the United States are of more value to England than all her colonies put together. Happily, an insolent tyranny drove them to rebellion before they were fatally emasculated. Ireland has suffered more from tutelage than any country. Mr. Chambers describes her connexion with England as an everlasting marriage of Intelligence to Imbecility, Truth to Falsehood, Industry to Sloth, Peace to Turbulence, Riches to Beggary, Life to Death; and thus concludes: 'Let us drop the curtain and hide the appalling spectacle. Not so, however, can we extinguish that maniac shout whose echoes linger dolefully on our ears,-'Why did you take me? Why did you keep me? Why did you demoralize me and unfit me for self-reliance? that my mind is gone, and I am in a state of idiotcy, I will cling-cling-cling to you for ever!''

Now

Oh, the guilt unutterable of thus prostrating the mind of a nation! We ask every Christian man, Is this a sort of union that ought to be maintained with artillery? What is there in it that can compensate for such tremendous moral ruin? Ireland, however, is recovering her faculties, and may yet make a terrible use of them. We grant her, for education, as much as would support four regiments of cavalry; but it were better no education at all had been allowed, if we mean to rule her by force. The ministers of Queen Anne were more consis

tent than those of Queen Victoria. They forbad the development of reason in men who were to be ruled like brutes.

In Lord John Russell's speech on Mr. Sharman Crawford's motion, he said that the peasantry are not worse off now than they were when Ireland had a Parliament of her own. Granting that this is true, it must surely be admitted that the imperial legislation of fifty years ought to have made their condition much better. But, whether Repeal be desirable or not, it is unfair and illogical to urge against it the common argument drawn from the inefficiency and corruption of the old Parliament. That was never the Parliament of the people. It was the Parliament of the landlords-the colonial council of the conquerors-a conclave of bigots and monopolists, who met, plotted, and enacted, for the sole purpose of keeping themselves up and the people down; and whose leading members undertook to carry any bill which the English ministry sent over, provided English power enabled them to tyrannize over the miserable natives. It does not follow that, because that Parliament did no good for the country, a rightly constituted native Parliament could not or would not. The Union was not, and, we fear, was not meant to be, a bona fide incorporation of the two kingdoms. It left the two races separate and hostile. The church of the monopolizing oligarchy was still suffered to prey on the vitals of the country. The alien parson took the tenth sheaf and the tenth potato from the poor man's field; while the landlord exempted himself from the sup port of his own church by throwing his land into pasture. A handful of Protestant retainers voted every Easter Monday that the Roman Catholics should pay for the bread and wine of their communion, for the ringing of their church bells, the opening of their pews, and the washing of their minister's surplice. The 'Church cess' was at last abolished, under threats of rebellion; and Lord John Russell thinks the Establishment entitled to consideration for the loss of property thereby sustained! In some places, the country actually rose in arms against the tithe system. But that was not abolished. O'Connell's horror of blood led him to accept a compromise, in which the people were cheated with a name, though relieved from an annoyance. The landlords undertook to pay the tithes to the clergy for 25 per cent. discount. That may have been a loss to the Church, but it was no gain to the Roman Catholic farmers. They continue to pay 100 per cent. as before; and Lord John seems afraid that, if the other 75 per cent. were taken from the clergy, it would follow the 25 per cent. into the landlords' pockets. If we want to see how the Premier becomes dwarfed in the presence

of great emergencies, we have only to consider what he said in reply to Mr. Hume on the Irish Establishment. No person,' he says, can deny that the appropriation of the whole revenue which the State has always recognized as the revenue of the Established Church, by a church to which only a small portion of the people belongs, is an anomaly and a grievance.' Why not, then, get rid of this undeniable anomaly and grievance? There are, it is said, insuperable difficulties in the way, the chief of which is, that the clergy of the small minority of the people would think it a great grievance that they should be deprived of any portion of the church property, which of right belongs to the whole nation. The endowed clergy belong to the aristocracy: hence, the subject is delicate, the ground dangerous, and the difficulty insuperable. Let famine, pestilence, rebellion, suspension of the constitution, military government, or any other social evils that can be imagined, come upon Ireland in consequence of this grievous national injustice,—no matter,-we dare not touch the Establishment. Such, in effect, is the avowal of the government.

A fresh proof was presented in the debate in the Lords on Secret Societies, of the pitiable impotence of the legislature in Irish matters. The Marquis of Lansdowne boasted of a 'constant endeavour' on the part of the Imperial Parliament, during fifty years, to benefit Ireland; and showed the value of that constant endeavour, by the fact mentioned, that only on that day the Royal assent had been given to a Bill for the Sale of Encumbered Estates, a measure so obviously necessary, that it ought to have been one of the first passed by the united parliament. And then the Duke of Wellington remarked, that for forty years the government had been striving to put down secret societies. Did it not occur to him, or to those who were capable of thinking, that forty years of failure in experimenting is quite sufficient to show the folly of persevering in the old course of policy. If, as was stated, four-fifths of the Catholic population are disaffected to such an extent as to render trial by jury impracticable; if the country can be held only by force; if nothing but the sword and cannon can maintain order; while the prisons are crowded, three or four persons being packed into a space designed for only one; is it not time to change the system? Did not the Whig ministry solemnly promise to change it? How disgusting is it to find them now throwing the blame of their do-nothing policy on the famine, on the fecundity and improvidence of the people, on agitation, and what not! They knew that so long as millions depended for food solely on such a precarious crop as the potato, famine was inevitable; they knew that hopeless poverty induces early marriages and