The scenes of misery did not stop here. Old John Russell 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."

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 county. 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

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which he has narrated, in taking a rapid retrospect of antecedent events, of which recent transactions may be reasonably accounted the sequel. 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

any

valuable book, the government had not discovered "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 rapid 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 undergone a pruning, while its roots remained untouched. Mr. Doherty is not the first Solicitor-General 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 (Charles Kendal Bushe), when 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 having 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 re-appear, which 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, that now something effectual has been done, and that the gaol and the gibbet there have 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 the origin of the 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 scrutinizer 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 insurrection-perform 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