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It may be moreover remarked, that in their threatening letters they affect the form and phraseology of legal notices (of which examples will be given in the next chapter), thereby intimating that they administer a law subsidiary to, or rather substituted for, the law of the state.

That the main object of the Whiteboy disturbances is to keep the actual tenant in undisturbed possession of his holding, and to cause it to be transferred at his death to his family, by preventing and punishing ejectment and the taking of land over another's head, is proved by a whole body of testimony. A secondary but not unfrequent object, is to regulate the rate of wages, by preventing the employment of strangers, or by requiring higher payment from the farmers. The Whiteboys, of late years, have rarely interfered with the collection of tithe, which was at one time their principal object of attack.

Before I proceed to the general statements of witnesses, I will lay before the reader an account of the objects or motives of the crimes committed in the province of Munster in the year 1833, so far as they could be collected from the reports made to the government by the inspectors-general of police. This Table (abstracted by the permission of the Irish government from the original Reports) will exhibit the comparative frequency of different motives, and will shew, at one glance, the peculiar character of the crimes in those parts of Ireland where the Whiteboy spirit prevails:

or otherwise if you do not give over your foolishness or ignorance you will will be made an example in the country that never was beheld.

"Here is to our foe of Stripe.

"Mr. John Waters, Esq., and I would be sorry to be in your clothes. "CAPTAIN ROCK, Esq."

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Motives of all the crimes committed in Munster, 1833, as far as can be collected from the Reports of the InspectorsGeneral:

Crimes connected with the occupation of land

employment of labourers

collection of tithes, rent, and local

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taxes, and the enforcing of their payment by law payment of tithes Crimes committed in order to obtain arms

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It will be seen that the general descriptions of the objects of the Whiteboy disturbances, given by the different witnesses, entirely agree with the details which have been just presented with respect to the province of Munster.

"The offences I allude to (says Mr. Justice Jebb, in addressing the grand jury of the county of Limerick in the Special Commission of 1831) are offences against statutes too well known to you under the name of the Whiteboy Acts; and that species of crime against which these Acts provide may be fairly characterized in a few words, as a war of the peasantry against the proprietors and occupiers of land.' The object of this warfare is to deprive the proprietors and occupiers of land of the power of disposing of their property as they may think fit, to dictate to them the terms on which their estates and property shall be dealt out to the peasantry, and to punish by all the means that can be resorted to such as disobey those dictates which the people think proper to issue †."

*See further note (B).

Report of the Proceedings under a Special Commission in the counties of Limerick and Clare in May and June, 1831. By Peter Gorman. p. 3.

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