Thus it appears, that from the first to the twentieth of February, not quite three weeks, twenty-nine capital offences have been committed in twenty different counties, sometimes three or four in the same day; and sometimes three or four in the same county. Of these, nine were murders, some perpetrated with savage ferocity; three attempts to murder; one threat to murder; two rescues from the arm of the law, and cruel assaults made on legal authorities; two arson; two sacrilege on places of public worship; one wanton destruction of property. In the perpetration of some of these offences, from one to fifty persons were known to be engaged, whose numbers were reckoned. In some, the numbers were not ascertained, but they are described as many persons" supposing, then, the average to be ten concerned in each outrage so designated, we have 286 malefactors known and denounced as being concerned in murder, robbery, arson, and other capital offences; and if to this, we add the "general gaol delivery" of his Excellency Lord Mulgrave, we will have 453 convicted and unconvicted felons turned loose, or not yet apprehended, all at large in this unhappy country! We will venture to say that such a state of things is unknown and unparalleled in any, even the most barbarous and ill governed, community in Europe, not in a state of actual warfare. We will go farther, and assert that in all the Protestant countries in Europe together, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, and, we may add, England, Scotland, and Wales, the same number of crimes, attended with the same savage cruelty, in which so many are known to be implicated, did not take place in the same short period. Indeed we are borne out in this assertion by what has happened at home. Where are the crimes perpetrated in any Protestant county of Ireland? Where in the list is to be found an outrage in the county Down, or county Derry, the great strongholds of the reformation in Ireland?-not one; while the districts in which it has unfortunately made less progress, are stained with blood and crime. In Sligo, five offences were committed, assaults and attempts to murder, and, in the contiguous Protestant county of Fermanagh, not one; yet Sligo is

the particular object of Lord Mu grave's tender mercy; but we do not find that it was extended to Ferma nagh, which indeed did not require it.

The pamphlet triumphantly appeals to the result of the several assizes for the proof of the decrease of crime; and we are willing to take the author even on his own showing, fallacious as it is, and abide by the same test. We will take the county of Waterford, and we do so because it has been distinguished as the most moral and least disturbed of the southern counties. It is well known that formerly for a period of fifteen years, there had not been a public execution in the city, and but three in the county; and it was the usual prac tice to present the judge with fringed gloves, as the accustomed compliment of "maiden" assizes. Last February the Judges Foster and Crampton presided, the former in the city, the latter in the county; they both declared their great regret that they "could not compli ment the grand juries as usual on the lightness of the calendar." In the city, hitherto untainted by crime, were eighteen cases, and these of a most serious nature, including murder, rape, robbery, house-burning, and adminis tering unlawful oaths. In the county they were increased to the enormous and unprecedented number, sixty-five! of a description, the judge said, "avful to contemplate." Eighteen homicides, of which nine were murder, and the rest so varied that there "was scarcely a crime of any kind not to be found in the calendar." This is the extorted confession of a Whig, confuting at once the flimzy statements and unfounded assertions of his own party.

But, Tipperary, the eminent in crime, the stain of modern civiliza tion, which has never been one year quiet since the rebellion of 1641, where whiteboys and rightboys have, for time out of mind, been the execu tors of the law, by burying the offender up to his neck in the earth, and bowling out his brains with stones, where superstition still retains unmitigated ascendency, and the peasant of the present day believes that his priest can cause a crow to drop down dead, by only cursing it as it flies across a field. Tipperary, which, in the language of the pamphlet itself, is

"A name identified with brawl, the head quarters of turbulence, where the

certainly a very painful task, to select a district illustrative of our assertion. However, there is one county which we cannot suffer to pass unnoticed, Longford. In this comparatively small county, which we remember, like Waterford, to have been one of the most peaceful in Ireland, outrages have become so frequent, that scarce a day passes in which we do not read of some atrocity arising, for the most part, from political hostility. In England, the elections are carried on with great animosity, but when they are once decided the ebullition subsides, and the part that any man has taken is no more remembered. But in Ire land, where spiritual matters are made subservient to temporal, where the priest is allowed to interfere, and the elector is ordered to vote for "the good of his soul," an undying and deadly rancour is generated, and the heretic enemy is persecuted in every possible form. This blasphemous prostitution of religion, was the watchword at many elections in Ireland, and it would be endless to detail every instance which has occurred of its excommunicating effects, where not only the offender, but all who had any intercourse with him, were marked out as victims; one example in Longford will be sufficient to shew the virulence with which the priest-driven supporters of the government candidate pursue their opponents. A Protestant, of the name of Hall, who has a mill at Clonumucker, voted for Mr. Fox; since the election there have been several instances of violent assaults on the houses and persons of farmers and others, whose sole offence was, that they presumed to have their corn ground at Hall's mill. In one case, of a man named Lenehan, the ferocious ruffians did not hesitate to fire at their victim, and in another they committed a cruel assault, accompany ing their blows with the warning, "take that for the good of your soul."

Among other instances of pacification, Lord Mulgrave's champion classes the cessation of orange meetings, or, as he terms them, "outrages," and expatiating on the signal "generosity and lenity" of the Irish executive, he takes occasion to remark that "the procession act was no longer permitted to remain a dead letter." When the funeral of the tithe rebel, Rourke, was paraded for more than ninety miles, from Dublin to Cappa

more, when notices were posted in every town and village on the road, when proclamations were issued from the altar of every chapel, to induce the people to assemble, when the conductors of the funeral went several miles out of the direct road in order to pass through Limerick, and lose no opportunity of agitating the already over-excited peasantry, was the procession act enforced? When Mr. O'Connell is pleased to announce an intended visit to Kilkenny or Clonmel, and all the idle and disaffected pour forth with green banners to meet him, is the procession act enforced? No: for these tend to advance the darling scheme of the “just and impartial government," the subversion of the church establishment; but the professed object of orangeism, is the support of the laws and upholding the principles of the reformation, objects of perfect indifference to the present ministry, and which they do not fail to discountenance on every occasion. But how little the interference of the executive was needed to suppress Orange "outrage" in the north, and how much it is required to check the atrocities of southern agitation, may be gathered from the statement of Mr. Hamilton; he shows, that the average of convictions for various felonies, is, in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, one in 715 of the population; in Ulster, 1 in 1351. Or, selecting a county from each, in order to contrast the comparative tranquillity of Protestant and Roman Cătholic districts more fairly than can be done where the population is more mixed, we find, in Kilkenny, a favourite instance of Mulgrave tranquillity, the convictions are one in 781 of the popu lation; in Down, one in 3190.

But we would tell Lord Mulgrave, and his panegyrist, that the cessation of Orange processions is not due to him. Delighted, as he doubtless would have been, to have had opportunities of exhibiting his "impartial lenity," the Orangemen saved him the trouble. No sooner was the wish of the legislature announced, that Orangemen should discontinue their meetings, than their own good feeling and the sense of the duty and respect which is due to every expression of the will of the legislature, however partial, at once terminated every authorized public exhibition of Orange feeling. This the author of the pamphlet cannot deny. He admits that on the following fifth of November,

an anniversary never before forgotten, there was no indecent disrespect of legal authority, no necessity for the interference of the executive. The day passed, among the orangemen of Ulster, as peaceably as if the remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot was unconnected with any association of greater importance, than a military review. Contrast this with the conduct of the Associa tion in Dublin. Its existence has been denounced in both houses; its dangerous character admitted by the leading ministers of the crown; yet, while the laws are daily violated by the peasantry, excited to the excess of seditious rebellion by the harangues of these men, they are suffered to beard the government in the very capital, which is every day demoralizing under their influ

ence.

The impression of this would perhaps be nothing but concern for the exquisite ridicule to which a nobleman was exposing himself, or, at worst, the painful feeling that that nobleman was the Viceroy of Ireland, and the respect and veneration to which his Majesty is entitled, and ought to inspire, were thus compromised by the manner in which his representative chose to exhibit himself. But when we consider further, that he not only compromised the respect due to the crown, but abused its highest prerogative; that the privilege entrusted to him, to be used only with sound and cautious discretion, he scattered about with absurd profusion, till the sense of guilt and innocence, and the judgment of life and death were utterly confounded, we cannot suppress our sorrow and indignation at the consequences which must result from it. For thus did he proceed, through Meath, Longford, Cavan, Sligo, Monaghan, Westmeath, Donegal, and Cork, from one extremity of Ireland to the other, not only canvassing salutes, but OPENING JAILS, and letting convicts loose, till, if we are not mistaken, 150 malefactors were turned out upon the country, by this summary process. Even the common decorum of referring to the judges was neglected; the jailer was sometimes his Excellency's only counsellor, the arbiter of the destinies of his Majesty's subjects. Thus were the judges of the law insulted, its sentences reversed, its just execution brought into suspicion, and crime encouraged by the sense and experience of impunity.

Of course the manner in which his Excellency has exercised the prerogative of mercy is the subject of eulogium. Let us not be imagined to be the enemies of humanity, or opposed to its exercise. We believe, as firmly as the most sentimental of novel-writing Whigs, that it "becomes the scepired monarch better than his crown," when it is duly and properly applied, when mercy tempers justice, and does not subvert it. But we believe the manner in which it has been now exerted only renders it an incentive to crime, and its exercise an object of contempt and ridicule. We happened to witness the progress of his Excellency through part of Ireland on this mission of mercy, and if it was intended to bring him and the government into contempt, and destroy that halo which should ever surround men in high authority, we think be could not have chosen a more effectual method. We saw him in the county of Kilkenny, about to pass under a triumphal arch formed of some bushes, suspended by a cord across the road. Before him rode, furiously, half a-dozen countrymen, brandishing white bludgeons, and clearing the way, like follabollough rioters at a Tipperary fair. Behind, followed his Excellency, in white pantaloons, lying back in an open barouche, and when he arrived under the arch, he stood up, with profound respect took off his hat, and saluted the group of ragged rabble that lined the ditches. We remember nothing like it, except the triumphal procession of Sir Daniel Donnelly, when her eturned from the ring at Mousley Hurst, the popular champion of Ire

land.

VOL. IX.

We

When men are at a loss to find something to praise, it is no wonder if they occasionally bring forward statements a little mal-a-propòs. The very next page to the eulogium on Lord Mulgrave's "clemency" is devoted to the "improvement in the system of selecting juries on criminal trials. Of course, the improvement is, that all juries are now unchallenged. confess it was very natural that after the anticipation of the punishment of guilt, the next subject of the author's admiration should be the prevention of its conviction. But it is rather an inappropriate occasion to have lying before the public, the unblushing assertion, that "such a change in the condition of society is a signal and palpable improvement," while we have the record of the last Carlow assizes to refer to. It is a notorious fact, that the

2Q

" unchallenged and unsuspected juries," though summoned to try cases of antitithe rioting, were, with one or two exceptions, composed exclusively of men known to approve of the system of resistance to tithe. This, of itself, is a sufficient insult to commom prudence and propriety, to summon a man to sit in judgment on an offence, arising from the very political tenets to which he was avowedly attached. But this was not enough. The scrupulous delicacy of the Attorney-General, in avoiding giving offence to the tender sensibili ties of the Carlow farmers, went a step further. At the trial of the Rathvilly rioters, there was a brother of one of the prisoners on the jury; and in the case of the disturbances at the Carlow election, the employer of another. The next step, we suppose, will be a patriarchal jurisdiction, where every murderer will be tried at his own fire-side, before a jury composed of his wife and family; and thus the expensive superfluities of jails and courts of justice, may be altogether dispensed with.*

We finally and solemnly appeal to the people of England, and ask them, will they suffer this state of things to continue, till Ireland be again severed from the empire? It is now near 700 years since it was annexed to the English crown, and Englishmen, and the descendants of Englishmen, have formed a population of millious, who do not call themselves aliens, or denounce the sassenach, but are still fondly attached to everything in their fatherland, and believe the laws, institutions and social habits of that country, from which they originally came, to be the source of everything good and valuable in the country, which is now their native land. We ask them, will they suffer this po

pulation, endeared to them by every tie, to be exterminated, or obliged to seek shelter elsewhere, as crowds have done, and are doing every day? It is now near 300 years since the reforma. tion was first planted in this country, and wherever it has advanced, industry, sobriety, morality, and peaceable habits have accompanied its progress; will they suffer this, their own faith to be put down, and rejected superstitions substituted in its place? There are 3000 clergymen of the established church, who do not yield to any other body of men, in talent, piety, charity and every social virtue, for whom a decent, and not more than a decent, provision has been made; will they suffer these men, in the discharge of their sacred and valuable duties, to be reduced to absolute beggary, and murdered if they dare to ask for their own? Will they deny them the protection which the humblest classes are entitled to and receive in England? they quietly see their houses and churches attacked-their persons assaulted their brains scattered about the roads-their lives in such universal danger, that few will venture on the hazard of ensuring them, so that they are even deprived of the melancholy means of providing for their destitute families after their own violent and premature deaths? We feel they will not. If the people of England be disabused, and the real state of the country be shown to them, they will no longer pin their faith on the audacious mendacity of illegal associations, or the plausible inanity of flimsy pamphlets. We hold it the duty of every honest periodical, to exert itself in the cause of truth, and our efforts shall not be wanting to promote it.

Will