sursum

up our hearts," and to rise above all lowly prejudice in the achievement of a great moral purpose. It is to the church itself that this " corda," this invocation, taken from the ancient ritual of Catholicism, should be addressed; he should abjure the body over which he exercises so great and natural an influence, and for which he has made great sacrifices, to ascend above every inferior consideration, and to regard the instruction of the people as paramount to every other object. The right honourable baronet has again and again protested his strong anxiety to render his measure acceptable to the great mass of the community, and to introduce such modifications as should meet all just objections. I trust that his professions may be realized, and as he told us that he would send forth his bill in the hope that it would receive the public sanction and indicate that the "waters of strife had subsided," let me be permitted to hope that he will associate with that image another incident connected with the primeval history of mankind, and bear in mind that every colour was united in distinctness without predominance, that token of peace which God set in the cloud, as a covenant of his reconciliation with the world.

IRISH ARMS BILL.

SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, MAY 19, 1843.

IF I were convinced that the Arms Bill, even in its present most obnoxious shape, was necessary for the repression of crime, I should reluctantly indeed, but strenuously, sustain it; but of its utter inefficiency for the attainment of that legitimate purpose, in which it is obligatory upon us all to concur, I am thoroughly persuaded. It is not to the want of an Arms Bill, such as this, it is to the imperfect, I am almost justified in calling it the impotent administration of justice, that the atrocities, by which certain districts in Ireland are unfortunately characterised, are to be ascribed. In the county of Tipperary the prosecutions at the assizes are begun, conducted, and terminated in such a manner as to secure impunity to crime. How has it come

to pass, that the offences which fall within the jurisdiction of the assistant-barrister, and are prosecuted by the local solicitor, have so signally diminished? I attribute that remarkable decrease to two causes; first, to the high judicial qualities, the talent, the firmness, the impartiality which has won the confidence of all parties, by which Mr. Howley, the assistant-barrister, is distinguished; and in the next place, to the signal usefulness of the local solicitor for the crown (Mr. Cahill), who unites with great ability a perfect knowledge of the country; has the best opportunities of ascertaining every incident connected with the cases in which he is concerned; is well acquainted with the character of every witness for the prosecution and the defence; never puts innocence in peril; and never permits ruffianism to escape. But while minor violations of the law are prosecuted with so much effect, what course is taken at the assizes? I beg most distinctly to state that nothing can be more remote from my intention than to speak in the language of personal depreciation of Mr. Kemmis, the crown solicitor for the Leinster circuit, or to suggest that a local solicitor should be employed in his place, without adding, that he should receive for any loss he may sustain the most ample compensation. But granting him to possess the highest professional qualifications, I have no hesitation at the same time in stating that the business of the crown cannot be efficiently carried on by a legal absentee, who knows nothing of the county, is utterly ignorant of the witnesses produced for or against the crown, is utterly unable, not from any want of capacity, but from his position, to suggest or advise the means by which truth can be substantiated, and falsehood can be confuted, is

hurried from one assize town to another, and must get up his briefs with inevitable precipitation, for the information of counsel, who are opposed by the most skilful advocates, aided by a local solicitor for the defence, by whom every imaginable expedient for the frustration of the crown is employed. It is obvious that, under this system, you give to crime advantages incalculably great. Another suggestion I shall, from a sense of duty-from my solicitude for the public tranquillity-venture to make. You resort to informers, and you pay them largely for their corrupt contribution to the enforcement of the law, but to honest witnesses adequate protection is not given. Some years ago the house of a person of the name of Crawford was attacked, and he was beaten almost to death. He was afraid to prosecute. He lived in my neighbourhood. I obtained from the government an undertaking that he and his family should be sent to one of the colonies, and should be provided for. He was prevailed on to prosecute, and justice was done, and a most useful example made. If you will pledge yourselves to protect the witnesses for the crown, by enabling them to emigrate, and by compensating them for the loss of their country, you will effect much more than by the unconstitutional proceeding which I am aware your high partisans invite you to adopt. It would be far more befitting in the landed proprietors to attend at the assizes, and perform their duty on criminal trials, than to call for a violation of a great public right. If there is a special commission got up with parade, and attended by the Attorney-General, with a retinue of counsel, the chief gentlemen of the county do not think it inconsistent with their dignity to act on the petty jury; but at the assizes, though the crimes to be prosecuted are of the same class, the juries are wholly different. The petty jury is considered an ungenteel and low concern; the balance in which human life is trembling is committed to coarser and less aristocratic sustainments, and complaints are afterwards made of the constitution of juries by the very men who vote it, what they call, in their familiar parlance, a bore" to attend. There is nothing which I more strongly deprecate than the setting aside of juries by the crown, except for the clearest and most indisputable reasons, but, on the other hand, I do think that the attendance of Roman Catholics and Protestants, of station and influence, on the criminal jury, should be enforced, and that, if necessary, fines of £500 or £600 should be imposed upon them. The utmost care should of course be taken that the juries should not be exclusive, and that no ground for imputation should be afforded; but that precaution being adopted, it is clear that the verdicts found by that class of men, whether of acquittal or of condemnation, would meet the general sanction.

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I am very well aware that the gentry of the country will be very adverse to this proposition; but they should bear in mind how large a stake they have in the tranquillity of the country, which will be far better promoted by these means than by an Arms Bill, which will take from honest men the means of defence, and will not deprive the turbulent and the lawless of the means of aggression. When murder becomes lucrative, it is not easy to deprive the assassin of the tools of his profitable trade. If you could succeed in depriving him of his more noisy implements of death, you would but teach him to substitute a more silent but not less efficacious weapon: but you cannot frame a law which he will not readily evade. The wretch who is not appalled at murder, will not tremble at an Arms Bill-your penalties of ten or twenty pounds will be scorned by men who put existence into habitual peril. These are among my reasons for thinking that the Arms Bill will not be in any degree conducive to the purpose it has ostensibly in view, while by its enactment, without obtaining any countervailing benefit, you commit a manifest trespass upon one of the chief constitutional rights which the bill, deriving its designation from those rights, has received. But my main objection to this bill is founded upon the distinction which it establishes between England and Ireland. "Repeal the Union-restore the Heptarchy!" Thus exclaimed George Canning, and stamped on the floor of this house as he gave utterance to a comparison in absurdity, which has been often cited. But that exclamation may be turned to an account, different from that to which it is applied. Restore the heptarchy-repeal the union. Good. But take up the map of England, and mark the subdivisions into which this your noble island was once distributed, and then suppose that in this assembly of wise men-this Imperial Parliament-you were to ordain that there should be one law in what once was the kingdom of Kent, and another in what once was the kingdom of Mercia-that in Essex there should be one municipal franchise, and in Sussex there should be another; that among the East Angles there should be one parliamentary franchise, and in Wessex there should be another; and that while through the rest of the island the Bill of Rights should be regarded as the inviolate and inviolable charter of British liberty, in the kingdom of Northumberland, an Arms Bill, by which the elementary principles of British freedom should be set at nought, should be enacted-would you not say that the restoration of the heptarchy could scarcely be more preposterous? What a mockery it is, what an offence it is to our feelings, what an insult to the understanding it is to expatiate upon the advantages of the union, and bid us rejoice that we are admitted to the

great imperial copartnership in power, while you are every day making the most odious distinctions between the two countries, establishing discriminating rights which are infinitely worse than discriminating duties, and furnishing the champions of repeal with pretences more than plausible, for insisting that if for England and Ireland different laws are requisite, for Ireland and for England different lawgivers are required. My chief, my great objection to this measure is, that it is founded upon the fatal policy to which Englishmen have so long adhered, and from which it is so difficult to detach them, of treating Ireland as a mere provincial appurtenance, instead of regarding her as part and parcel of the realm. You are influenced by a kind of instinct of domination, which it requires no ordinary effort of your reason to overcome. I do not think that by Englishmen an Arms Bill like this would be endured. That observation does not rest on mere conjecture; in the year 1819 this country was in a most perilous condition. It appeared from a report made by a secret committee of which the present Lord Derby was the chairman, that large bodies of men were trained to the use of arms in the dead of the night, in sequestered places; that a revolutionary movement, to be accomplished by disciplined insurrection, was contemplated, and that revolt was organised for war. In this state of things an English Arms Bill, one of the Six Acts, was proposed. Lord Castlereagh was then the leader of the House of Commons, but although he had served his apprenticeship in Ireland—although he had dissected in Ireland before he attempted to operate in England; and although his hand was peculiarly steady, and he was admitted on all hands not to be destitute of determination, still he did not think it prudent to propose for England such a bill as for Ireland you have thought it judicious to introduce. There is the English Arms Bill of 1819. It is comprised in a single page, look at it; the ocular comparison will not be inappropriate; here is the Irish Arms Bill, a whole volume of coercion, in which tyranny is elaborated in every possible diversity of form which it was possible to impart to it. In the English Arms Bill no penalty whatever was inflicted for the possession of arms: in your Arms Bill, an Irishman can be transported for seven years for having arms in his possession. But although the English Arms Bill was moderate when compared with the Irish, yet Lord Grey denounced it in the House of Lords.* In the House of Commons, Mr. Henry Brougham exclaimed: "Am I an Englishman? for I begin to doubt it, when measures so utterly

* Mr. Sheil read Lord Grey's protest against one of the Six Acts in 1819.