an Irish funeral, and accompanied with a most pathetic gesture. They both swung themselves with a sort of oscillation up and down, with their heads thrown back, striking their hands, with the fingers half closed, against their breasts, in the manner which Roman Catholics use in saying "The Confiteor." The reference which they made to their father drew my attention to the miserable old man. Two persons, friends of his, had attended him in court, and when his sons, after having been found guilty, were about to be removed, he was lifted on the table, on which he was with difficulty sustained, and was brought near to the dock. He wanted to embrace John Keogh, and stretched out his arms towards him. The latter, whose manliness now forsook him, leaned over the iron spikes to his full length, got the old man into his bosom, and while his tears ran down his face, pressed him long and closely to his heart. They were at length separated, and the sons were removed to the cells appointed for the condemned. The Judge left the bench, and the court was gradually cleared. Still the father of the prisoners remained between his two attendants almost insensible. He was almost the last to depart. I followed him out. It was a dark and stormy night. The wind beat full against the miserable wretch, and made him totter as he went along. His attendants were addressing to him some words of consolation connected with religion, (for these people are, with all their crimes, not destitute of religious impressions,) but the old man only answered them with his moans. He said nothing articulate, but during all the way to the obscure cellar into which they led him, continued moaning as he went. It was not, I trust, a mere love of the excitement which arises from the contemplation of scenes in which the passions are brought out, that made me watch this scene of human misery. I may say without affectation, that I was (as who would not have been?) profoundly moved by what I saw ; and when I beheld this forlorn and desolate man descend into his wretched abode, which was lighted by a feeble candle, and saw him fall upon his knees in helplessness, while his attendants gave way to sorrow, I could not restrain my own tears.

The scenes of misery did not stop here. Old John Russel pleaded guilty. He had two sons, lads of fifteen or sixteen, and, in the hope of saving them, acknowledged his crime at the bar; "Let them," he said, in the gaol where I saw him, "let them put me on the trap if they like, but let them spare the boys."

But I shall not proceed farther in the detail of these dreadful incidents. There were many other trials at the assizes, in which terrible disclosures of barbarity took place. For three weeks the two Judges were unremittingly employed in trying cases of dreadful atrocity, and in almost every instance the perpetrators of crimes the most detestable, were persons whose general moral conduct stood in a wonderful contrast with their isolated acts of depravity. Almost every offence was connected with the great agrarian organisation which prevails through the country. It must be acknowledged that, terrible as the misdeeds of the Tipperary peasantry must upon all hands be admitted to be, yet, in general, there was none of the meanness and turpitude observable in their enormities which characterise the crimes that are disclosed at an English assize. There were scarcely any examples of murder committed for mere gain. It seemed to be a point of honour with the malefactors to take blood, and to spurn at money. Almost every offence was committed in carrying a system into effect, and the victims who were sacrificed were considered by their immolators as offered up, upon a justifiable principle of necessary extermination. These are assuredly important facts, and after having contemplated these moral phenomena, it becomes a duty to inquire into the causes from which these marvellous atrocities derive their origin. But before I proceed to suggest what I conceive to be the sources of a condition so disastrous, it is not inappropriate to inquire how long the lower orders in Ireland have been habituated to these terrible practices, and to look back to the period at which they may be considered to have had their origin. If these crimes were of a novel character, and had a

recent existence, that circumstance would afford strong grounds for concluding that temporary expedients, and the vigorous administration of the law applied to the suppression of local and ephemeral disturbances, would be of avail. But if we find that it is not now, or within these few years, that these symptoms of demoralisation have appeared, it is then reasonable to conclude that there must be some essential vice, some radical imperfection in the general system by which the country is governed, and it is necessary to ascertain what the extent and root of the evil is, before any effectual remedy can be discovered for its cure. This is a subject of paramount interest, and its importance will justify the writer of this article, after a detail of the extraordinary incidents which he has narrated, in taking a rapid retrospect of antecedent events, of which recent transactions may be reasonably accounted the perpetuation. In doing so, some coincidence may be found with what the writer may have observed elsewhere, but the fear of incurring the imputation either of tediousness or self-citation shall not deter him from references to what he conceives to be of great and momentous materiality. The first and leading feature in the disturbances and atrocities of Tipperary is, that they are of an old date, and have been for much more than half a century of uninterrupted continuance. Arthur Young travelled in Ireland in the years 1776, 1777, and 1778. His excellent book is entitled, "A Tour in Ireland, with general Observations on the Present State of that Kingdom." Although the professed object of Arthur Young in visiting Ireland was to ascertain the condition of its agriculture, and a great portion of his work turns upon that subject, yet he has also investigated its political condition, and pointed out what he conceived to be the chief evils by which the country was afflicted, and the mode of removing them. He adverts particularly to the state of the peasantry in the South of Ireland, and it is well worthy of remark that the outrages which are now in daily commission, were of exactly the same character as the atrocities which were perpetrated by the Whiteboys (as the insurgents were called) in 1760. "The Whiteboys," says Arthur Young, in p. 75 of the quarto edition, "began in Tipperary. It was a common practice with them to go in parties about the country, swearing many to be true to them, and forcing them to join by menaces, which they very often carried into execution. At last they set up to be general redressers of grievances-punished all obnoxious persons who advanced the value of lands, or held farms over their head; and, having taken the administration of justice into their own hands, were not very exact in the distribution of it. They forced masters to release their apprentices, carried off the daughters of rich farmers, ravished them into marriages, they levied sums of money on the middling and lower farmers, in order to support their cause, in defending prosecutions against them, and many of them subsisted without work, supported by these prosecutions. Sometimes they committed considerable robberies, breaking into houses and taking money under pretence of redressing grievances. In the course of these outrages they burned several houses, and destroyed the whole substance of those obnoxious to them. The barbarities they committed were shocking. One of their usual punishments, and by no means the most severe, was taking people out of their beds, carrying them naked in winter on horseback for some distance, and burying them up to their chin in a hole with briers, not forgetting to cut off one of their ears." Arthur Young goes on to say that the Government had not succeeded in discovering any radical cure. It will scarcely be disputed that the Whiteboyism of 1760 corresponds with that of 1828; and if, when Arthur Young wrote his valuable book, the Government had not discovered any " radical cure," it will scarcely be suggested that any remedy has since that time been devised. From the period at which these outrages commenced, the evil has continued in a rapidly progressive augmentation. Every expedient which legislative ingenuity could invent has been tried. All that the terrors of the law could accomplish, has been put into experiment without avail. Special commissioners and special delegations of counsel have been almost annually despatched into the disturbed districts, and crime appears to have only under

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gone a pruning, while its roots remained untouched. Mr. Doherty is not the first Solicitor-general of great abilities who has been despatched by Government for the purpose of awing the peasantry into their duty. The present Chief Justice of the King's Bench, upon filling Mr. Doherty's office, was sent upon the same painful errand, and after having been equally successful in procuring the conviction of malefactors, and brandished the naked sword of justice, with as puissant an arm, new atrocities have almost immediately afterwards broken forth, and furnished new occasions for the exercise of his commanding eloquence. It is reasonable to presume that the recent executions at Clonmel will not be attended with any more permanently useful consequences, and symptoms are already beginning to reappear, which, independently of the admonitions of experience, may well induce an apprehension that before much time shall go by, the law officers of the crown will have to go through the same terrible routine of prosecution. It is said, indeed, by many sanguine speculators on the public peace, that now, indeed, something effectual has been done, and that the gaol and the gibbet there has given a lesson that will not be speedily forgotten. How often has the same thing been said when the scaffold was strewed with the same heaps of the dead! How often have the prophets of tranquillity been falsified by the event. If the crimes which, ever since the year 1760, have been uninterruptedly committed, and have followed in such a rapid and tumultuous succession, had been only of occasional occurrence, it would be reasonable to conclude that the terrors of the law could repress them. But it is manifest that the system of atrocity does not depend upon causes merely ephemeral, and cannot, therefore, be under the operation of temporary checks. We have not merely witnessed sudden inundations which, after a rapid desolation, have suddenly subsided; we behold a stream as deep as it is dark, which indicates, by its continuous current, that it is derived from an unfailing fountain, and which, however augmented by the contribution of other springs of bitterness, must be indebted for its main supply to some abundant and distant source. Where then is the well-head to be found? Where are we to seek for the origin of evils, which are of such a character that they carry with them the clearest evidence that their causes must be as enduring as themselves? It may at first view, and to any man who is not well acquainted with the moral feelings and habits of the great body of the population of Ireland, seem a paradoxical proposition that the laws which affect the Roman Catholics furnish a clue by which, however complicated the mazes may be which constitute the labyrinth of calamity, it will not be difficult to trace our way. It may be asked, with a great appearance of plausibility, (and indeed it is often inquired,) what possible effect the exclusion of a few Roman Catholic gentlemen from Parliament, and of still fewer Roman Catholic barristers from the bench, can produce in deteriorating the moral habits of the people? This, however, is not the true view of the matter. The exclusion of Roman Catholics from office is one of the results of the penal code, but it is a sophism to suggest that it is the sum total of the law itself, and that the whole of it might be resolved into that single proposition. The just mode of presenting the question would be this: "What effect does the penal code produce by separating the higher and the lower orders from each other?" Before I suggest any reasons of my own, it may be judicious to refer to the same writer, from whom I have extracted a description of the state of the peasantry, with which its present condition singularly corresponds. The authority of Arthur Young is of great value, because his opinions were not in the least degree influenced by those passions which are almost inseparable from every native of Ireland. He was an Englishman-had no share in the factious animosities by which this country is divided-he had a cool, deliberate, and scientific mind-was a sober thinker, and a deep scrutiniser into the frame and constitution of society, and was entirely free from all tendency to extravagance in speculation, either political or religious. Arthur Young's book consists of two parts. In the first he gives a minute account of what he saw in Ireland, and in the second, under a series of chapters, one of which is appropriately entitled "Oppression," he states what he

conceives to be the causes of the lamentable condition of the people. Having prefixed this title of " oppression" to the 29th page of the second part of his book, he says, "The landlord of an Irish estate inhabited by Roman Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields obedience in whatever concerns the poor to no law, but his own will. To discover what the liberty of a people is, we must live amongst them, and not look for it in the statutes of the realm: the language of written law may be that of liberty, but the situation of the poor may speak no language but that of slavery. There is too much of this contradiction in Ireland; a long series of oppression, aided by many very ill-judged laws, has brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of a most unlimited submission: speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves, in many cases, slaves, even in the bosom of written liberty!... The abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppressive conduct of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin of the kingdom, who were never out of it, altogether bear still very heavy on the poor people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we ever behold in England." In the next page after these preliminary observations, this able writer (who said in vain fifty years ago, what since that time so many eminent men have been in vain repeating,) points out more immediately the causes of the crimes committed by the peasantry, which he distinctly refers to the distinctions of religion. The proper distinction in all the discontents of the people is into Protestant and Catholic. The Whiteboys being labouring Catholics, met with all those oppressions I have described, and would probably have continued in full submission, had not very severe treatment blown up the flame of resistance. The atrocious acts they were guilty of made them the objects of general indignation: acts were passed for their punishment, which seemed calculated for the meridian of Barbary: it is manifest that the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of a radical cure, from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which, in fact, lay in themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows. Let them change their own conduct entirely, and the poor will not long riot. Treat them like men, who ought to be free as yourselves: put an end to that system of religious persecution, which for seventy years has divided the kingdom against itself. In these two things lies the cure of insurrectionperform them completely, and you will have an affectionate poor, instead of oppressed and discontented vassals; a better treatment of the poor in Ireland is a very material point to the welfare of the whole British empire. Events may happen which may convince us fatally of this truth. If not, oppression would have broken all the spirit and resentment of men. By what policy the Government of England can, for so many years, have permitted such an absurd system to be matured in Ireland, is beyond the power of plain sense to discover." Arthur Young may be wrong in his inference, (I do not think that he is.) but, be he right or wrong, I have succeeded in establishing that he, whose evidence was most dispassionate and impartial, referred the agrarian barbarities of the lower orders to the oppression of the Roman Catholics. But the passage which I have cited is not the strongest. The seventh section of his work is entitled “Religion." After saying that "the domineering aristocracy of five hundred thousand Protestants, feel the sweets of having two millions of slaves," (the Roman Catholic body was then not one third of what the penal code has since made it,) he observes, "the disturbances of the Whiteboys, which lasted ten years, (what would he now say of their duration?) in spite of every exertion of legal power, were, in many circumstances, very remarkable, and in none more so than in the surprising intelligence among the Insurgents, wherever found. It was universal, and almost instantaneous. The numerous bodies of them, at whatever distance from each other, seemed animated by one zeal, and not a single instance was known, in that long course of time, of a single individual betraying the cause. The severest threats and the most splendid promises of reward had no other effect than to draw closer the bonds which cemented a multitude to all appearance so desultory. It was then

evident that the iron hand of oppression had been far enough from securing the obedience, or crushing the spirit of the people; and all reflecting men, who consider the value of religious liberty, will wish it may never have that effect,-will trust in the wisdom of Almighty God, for teaching man to respect even those prejudices of his brethren, that are imbibed as sacred rights, even from earliest infancy; that, by dear-bought experience of the futility and ruin of the attempt, the persecuting spirit may cease, and toleration establish that harmony and security which, five score years' experience has told us, is not to be purchased at the expense of humanity."

This is strong language, and was used by a man who had no connecting sympathy of interest, of religion, or of nationality with Ireland. So unequivocal an 'opinion, expressed by a person of such authority, and whose credit is not affected by any imaginable circumstance, must be admitted to have great weight, even if there was a difficulty in perceiving the grounds on which that opinion rested. But there is little or none. The law divides the Protestant proprietor from the Catholic tiller of the soil, and generates a feeling of tyrannical domination in the one, and of hatred and distrust in the other. The Irish peasant is not divided from his landlord by the ordinary demarcations of society. Another barrier is erected, and, as if the poor and the rich were not already sufficiently separated, religion is raised as an additional boundary between them. The operation of the feelings, which are the consequence of this division, is stronger in the county of Tipperary than elsewhere. It is a peculiarly Cromwellian district, or, in other words, the holy warriors of the Protector chose it as their land of peculiar promise, and selected it as a favourite object of confiscation. The lower orders have good memories. There is scarce a peasant who, as he passes the road, will not point to the splendid mansions of the aristocracy, embowered in groves, or rising upon fertile elevations, and tell you the name of the pious Corporal, or the inspired Serjeant, from whom the present proprietors derive à title which, even at this day, appears to be of a modern origin. These reminiscences are of a most injurious tendency. But, after all, it is the system of religious separation which nurtures the passions of the peasantry with these pernicious recollections. They are not permitted to forget that Protestantism is stamped upon every institution in the country, and their own sunderance from the privileged class is perpetually brought to their minds. Judges, sheriffs, magistrates, Crown counsel, law officers, -all are Protestant. The very sight of a court of justice reminds them of the degradations attached to their religion, by presenting them with the ocular proof of the advantages and honours which belong to the legal creed. It is not, therefore, wonderful that they should feel themselves a branded caste; that they should have a consciousness that they belong to a debased and inferior community; and having no confidence in the upper classes, and no reliance in the sectarian administration of the law, that they should establish a code of barbarous legislation among themselves, and have recourse to what Lord Bacon calls "the wild justice" of revenge. A change of system would not perhaps produce immediate effects upon the character of the people; but I believe that its results would be much more speedy than is generally imagined. At all events, the experiment of conciliation is worth the trial. Every other expedient has been resorted to, and has wholly failed. It remains that the legislature, after exhausting all other means of tranquillising Ireland, should, upon a mere chance of success, adopt the remedy which has at least the sanction of illustrious names for its recommendation. The union of the two great classes of the people in Ireland, in other words, the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, is in this view not only recommended by motives of policy, but of humanity; for who that has witnessed the scenes which I have (perhaps at too much length) detailed in these pages, can fail to feel that, if the demoralization of the people arises from bad government, the men who from feelings of partisanship persevere in that system of misrule, will have to render a terrible account?