"In offering an opinion on the state of Ireland (says Sir Hussey Vivian) there is one thing I should wish to notice, and that is the extraordinary carelessness of human life amongst the lower classes. I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to find out whence it arises that men who appear so kind in their dispositions, so grateful for any little kindness bestowed upon them, as the lower class of Irish generally are, should exhibit such little apparent reluctance to destroy their fellow-creatures. I have asked the Catholic clergy; I have expressed my astonishment that they who have such power and influence over the minds of the lower classes, do not prevent it; but neither they nor others I have spoken to on the subject pretend to account for it. It is a very striking circumstance in Ireland, that a disturbance scarcely ever arises but you hear of the loss of life; and during the whole of the disturbances in England (I mean no invidious comparison) there was but one instance in which a hand was raised against an individual: it is a matter well worthy of the consideration of those who would civilize and tranquillize Ireland, to ascertain whence arises this extraordinary difference."-H. C., 1832, No. 1475.

It is, unfortunately, far easier to account for this disposition of the Irish peasantry than to remove it. Their indifference to the sufferings of which they are the cause, arises from the consciousness that their conduct will be approved by their own class: that public

One evening his house was entered; I am not sure whether the door was forced, or if he opened it at the desire of a neighbour; a body of men came in. The man, aware from their threats what their object was, concealed his wife in the bed curtains. They threw him down, put a cord round his neck and forced his tongue out, which they cut off, and then cut off the joints of his fingers, joint by joint; his unfortunate wife screamed out; they took her and cut off with a blunt instrument the joints of her fingers: they then cut off her breasts, seized her son, a boy of thirteen years old, cut out his tongue, and cut the calves of his legs. The unfortunate man asked if he had ever injured them; they replied not; but this was the beginning of what all his sort might expect. I knew the boy afterwards; he lived for some years on my property, and was a yeoman in the corps which my father commanded." (No. 30.)

opinion, so far as they come in contact with it, is in their favour. A man who murders for his own gain must make up his mind to general execration, if he is detected: he must be prepared (like Bishop and Williams, the murderers of the Italian boy) to die on the scaffold, in the midst of the yells and curses of the lowest of the populace. But a Whiteboy who carries into effect the wishes of his own order, who executes a law of opinion, has nothing to fear but the power of the magistrate he knows that the sharper the pain which he inflicts, the louder and more general will be the approbation of his fellows. Nothing is more common than to see how persons, when acting as members of a body, will throw off those moral restraints by which they are habitually governed in their individual capacity. Not only does this arise from the consciousness of power, every member of a body (as Thucydides has remarked) thinking himself worth more than an unit: but also from the anticipation of support from his party, and the absence of the check of general reprobation. Hence we have seen that aristocracies have, in their collective capacity, perpetrated acts from which individuals among them would have shrunk with horror; hence we see that, in mobs, people mutually encourage and urge on one another into excesses which they would never have coolly planned as isolated individuals. That the difference between England and Ireland, in regard to the carelessness of human life, arises not so much from the nature of the people as from the difference of the circumstances in which they are placed, appears from the fact that, when in England the opinion of a large body has been in favour of atrocious crime, atrocious crimes have been committed. Of this the outrages

perpetrated by the Trades' Unions afford a sufficient proof: the murder of Mr. Ashton, in Cheshire, by two men who were hired by the Trades' Union and received ten pounds for killing him, is equal in atrocity to almost any Irish murder: and the rick-burnings in the south and east of England show how far a system of deliberate crime will spread when there is a real grievance to justify it.

Another evil effect of the Whiteboy system, as respects the character of the peasantry, is its liability to pass from a voluntary penal system with a limited and defined object, into an open insurrection, into a state of general licence and outrage (such as was described above, as having existed a few years ago in Clare), in which the people are exposed to the frightfully demoralizing influence of an absence of all temporal and legal sanctions of all check except that derived from the fear of punishment in a future state. When it is considered how often the Irish peasant has been exposed to these periodical suspensions of government, it is more remarkable that his general morality should be so high as it is, than that it should not be higher.

Viewing the Whiteboy system in the light most favourable to the Whiteboys themselves; considering it (as we have just called it) to be a voluntary penal system, we must admit that, taken as a system of punishment it is one of the worst ever contrived by the head or executed by the hand of man. It is liable to all those objections which have been urged by enlightened reformers against the criminal law of different states. is unnecessarily severe in its penalties: it inflicts death in the most unsparing manner: it uses bad punishments, such as bodily mutilation: it punishes the in

It

nocent, as where it wounds a man through his relations : it strikes the weak and spares the strong: it is unequal ; it is uncertain; it is capricious; it is vindictive. Moreover, it has a bad quality peculiar to itself, and shared by no legal penal system, not even in the rudest and most barbarous times, viz., the destruction of property which it occasions. Governments inflict pain by imprisonment or exile, but as the Whiteboys cannot imprison or banish, they inflict pain by injuring men's property. Hence their penal system is wasteful and expensive beyond any other, inasmuch as it ravages the country like an invading army. Mr. De la Cour, of the county of Cork, being asked whether the destruction of property had not been a great object in the disturbances, answers:

"The destruction of property has been very considerable; and upon that subject perhaps there is scarcely any better evidence than myself, because I have been the person to pay the amount of the several presentments which have been made as compensations for them in our country*."

On the whole, the amount of evil inflicted is quite incommensurate with the good sought to be conferred by the system. Pain (to use Mr. Bentham's expression) has been wasted in the most lavish manner. Its effects are felt by the good as well as by the bad landlord; and they fall with their full weight on the head of the quiet and hardworking peasant.

"Although an extensive perusal of the reports of the chief constables (says Lord Oxmantown, in a letter already quoted) will exhibit to you a picture of society, perhaps without parallel in any civilized country not in open insurrection, still it will convey but an inadequate idea of the sufferings of the indus

* H. C., 1825, p. 553.

trious peasantry in this state of anarchy. To be enabled to judge of it, you must make your inquiries on the spot; you must hear the tale from themselves. Living in a state of perpetual anxiety, their lives are wretched indeed. Under such circumstances can we wonder at the statement of the magistrates assembled at Belmont sessions, to the effect that numbers of the respectable peasantry were seeking refuge from this state of things in America." "It would be right (he also says) that the utmost attention should be paid to patrolling, were it only for the purpose of showing to the peaceable inhabitants of a disturbed district that the country was not in undisputed possession of these armed gangs. Any measure calculated to give them confidence must be most valuable. No one can form an adequate conception of their apprehensions, and the amount of positive misery arising from it, who has not conversed with them himself. While the outrages, numerous as they are, affect but a limited portion of the population, the evil I have alluded to extends to all*."

The state of apprehension among the peasantry lest they should be visited by the Whiteboys, however miserable, is less painful than that which prevails among the guilty, when nearly the whole population has been implicated, and the reign of the law is restored. Even the habitual hatred of an informer is then scarcely strong enough to repress the disposition to purchase safety by becoming a witness for the crown.

"My Lords, (says the Attorney-General in addressing the court, at the close of the Clare Special Commission,) the first and almost the immediate effect of these convictions was to scatter distrust over every part of the illegal associations that overran the country-every man, conscious of his own guilt, and knowing it to be in the power of his associates to betray him, is kept

* Papers relating to the State of Ireland, 1834, p. 19, 20.