cedence of the Arms Bill been maintained? wherefore is it that everything is to be postponed to an Arms Bill? The Secretary for Ireland tells us, that order must be asserted, before freedom is conferred, that crime must be repressed, and that the "thirst for Arms," that was his expression, must be repressed. The thirst for arms! There is another thirst, for which you have taken care to provide. Have you, who profess yourselves to be guardians of the national morality, manifested an uniform and undeviating solicitude for the virtue of the people over whom you are appointed to watch? Despite of every remonstrance, notwithstanding the most earnest expostulation, did you not persist in the enactment of a financial measure, which has given the strongest stimulant to crime, and has already produced some of the most deleterious effects which, it was foretold, would be inevitably derived from it. You know full well, that the most frightful crimes which have been perpetrated in Ireland, have had their origin in those habits of intoxication, which the Evangelist of Temperance, if I may so call him, had so effectually restrained, until the Chancellor of the Exchequer had determined to counteract his noble efforts. Every private still is a hot-spring, from which atrocity gushes up, and supplies those draughts of fire, with which ferocious men madden themselves to murder, and drive away every sentiment of humanity and of remorse, and surrender themselves to the demon that takes possession of their hearts. And yet you talk to us of the necessity of suppressing crime being paramount to every other consideration, and of the "thirst for arms," and deal in all that false sentimentality, with which the real purpose by which you are actuated, is so thinly and imperfectly disguised. It is not wonderful that when such is the spirit in which you legislate for Ireland, that the people of Ireland, weary of and disgusted with your unfairness and incapacity, should demand the restitution of their parliament, and insist upon the right of governing themselves. And how has the First Lord of the Treasury met the requisition for self-government, which the Irish people had preferred to him? He came down to the house with a well meditated reply to the question put to him by the noble lord (Lord Jocelyn), and referring to the answer of King William the Fourth, in which that monarch expressed himself opposed to the Repeal of the Union, stated her Majesty's coincidence with that opinion; but omitted the conciliatory assurances with which that opinion was accompanied. I am very far from believing that the right honourable baronet, as has been imputed to him, intended by a reference to his Sovereign, to produce any refrigeration in the feelings of warm attachment which the people of Ireland entertain towards their beloved Sovereign; I think, that as he appealed in the name of the parliament to their fears, he appealed in the name of their Sovereign to the affections of the Irish people. For my own part, as long as I shall be permitted to refer to a document which has become a part of history, I never shall object to any reference to the opinions of my Sovereign with regard to Ireland. I hold in my hand a letter written by Lord John Russell to Lord Normanby, by the command of his Sovereign, on her accession to the throne That letter is in the following words :

"Whitehall, July 18, 1837. "My Lord-In confiding again to your Excellency the important charge of administering the affairs of Ireland in her Majesty's name, the Queen has commanded me to express to your excellency her Majesty's entire approbation of your past conduct, and her desire that you should continue to be guided by the same principles on which you have hitherto acted.

The Queen willingly recognises in her Irish subjects a spirit of loyalty and devotion to her person and government.

"Her Majesty is desirous to see them in the full enjoyment of that civil and political equality which, by a recent statute, they are fully entitled to, and her Majesty is persuaded that when invidious distinctions are altogether obliterated, her throne will be more secure and her people more truly united.

"The Queen has seen with satisfaction the tranquillity which has Lately prevailed in Ireland, and has learned with pleasure that the general habits of the people are in a state of progressive improvement arising from their confidence in the just administration of the power of government.

"I am commanded by her Majesty to express to you her Majesty's cordial wishes for the continued success of your administration; and your Excellency may be assured that your efforts will meet with firm support from her Majesty.

"The Queen further desires that you will assure her Irish subjects of her impartial protection.

"JOHN RUSSELL,"

Such was the language dictated by the young Queen of England to her minister. She had read the history of Ireland-she had perused (and in the perusal was not, I am sure, unmoved) the narrative of oppres sion and woe; she knew that for great wrongs a great compensation was due to us; she felt more than joy at witnessing the blessed fruits which had resulted from the first experiment in justice, and she charged her minister to express her deep solicitude for the welfare of the people of Ireland. Never did a sovereign impose upon a minister a more pleasurable office. With what admiration, with what a sentiment of respectful and reverential admiration must he have looked upon that young and imperial lady, when, in the fine morning of her life, and in the dawn of her resplendent royalty, he beheld her with the most brilliant diadem in the world glittering upon her smooth and unruffled forehead, with her countenance beaming with dignified emotion, and heard her, with that voice which seems to have been given to her for the utterance of no other language than that of gentleness and of mercy, giving expression to her affectionate and lofty sympathy for an unfortunate, but a brave, a chivalrous, and for her enthusiastically loyal and alterably devoted people. How different a spectacle does Ireland now present from that which it then presented to the contemplation her of Sovereign! She cannot be insensible to the change. In return for your ster advice to your sovereign, did you not receive a reciprocal

admonition; and did she not tell you, or did not your own conscience tell you to look on Ireland, and to compare her condition under a Whig and Conservative administration. But it is not with Whig policy alone that your policy should be compared; your own policy in a country more fortunate than ours furnishes almost an appropriate matter of adjuration. Why do you tell me, in the name of common consistency and plain sense, wherefore do you adopt in Canada a policy so utterly opposite from that which in Ireland it is your and our misfortune that you should pursue? From a system so diametrically opposed, how can the same results be expected to follow? In Canada, under the old colonial rule, there prevailed a strong addiction to democracy, a leaning towards the great republic in their vicinage, a deep hatred of England, and a spirit which broke at last into a sanguinary and exceedingly costly rebellion. You had the sound feeling and the sound sense to open your eyes at last to the series of mistakes, which successive governments had committed with regard to Canada; your policy was not only changed but revolutionized; you abandoned the "family compact" you placed the government in sympathy with the people, and you raised to office men who had been pursued to the death, and conferred honours upon those to whom decapitation, had they been arrested, would at one period have been awarded. The result has been what all wise men had anticipated and what all good men had desired. In a late debate I heard the Prime Minister expatiate upon the necessity of dealing in reference to Canada, in the most liberal and conciliatory spirit, and when I heard him, I could not refrain from exclaiming: "Oh! that for Ireland, for unhappy Ireland-Oh! that for my country, he would feel as he does towards Canada, and in its regard act the same generous part!" That prayer which rose involuntarily from my lips, I now-yes, to address to you. The part which in Canada you have had the wisdom and the virtue to act, have in Ireland, (but oh! without a civil war !) have the virtue and the wisdom to follow. Rid, rid yourself in Ireland of "the family compact." Banish Orangeism from the Castle; put yourselves into contact in place of putting yourselves into collision with the people? reform the Protestant Church; conciliate the Catholic priesthood; disarm us, but not of the weapons against which this measure is directed-strip us of that triple panoply with which he who hath his quarrel just is invested-do this, and if you will do this, you will do far more for the tranquillization of Ireland, for the consolidation of the empire, and for your own renown, than if you were by arms bills and by coercion acts, and by a whole chain of despotic enactments, to succeed in inflicting upon Ireland, that bad, that false, that deceptive, that desolate tranquillity which the history of the world, which all the philosophy that teaches by example, which the experience of every British statesman, which, above all, your own experience should teach you, is sure to be followed by calamities greater than any by which it w99 preceded.

now venture

VOTE BY BALLOT.

SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, JUNE 21, 1843,

Ir is more than difficult to give freshness and originality to the subject which has been introduced with so much ability by my honourable friend, and if it were incumbent on those who take a share in its discussion to impart to it that sort of interest which arises from speculations equally novel and refined, I should not have ventured to interpose; but so far from thinking that the ballot offers an appropriate occasion for a display of that dexterity in disputation, from which, if some entertainment, little instruction can be derived, I feel persuaded that a great and simple cause must be damaged far more than it can be promoted by any subtlety of disquisition which may be indulged in its sustainment. Where manifest abuses exist-abuses not only capable of proof, but of which the evidence amounts to demonstration, and arguments founded on undisputable facts can be so readily adduced, political metaphysics ought to be avoided. It is far wiser, in place of straining for ingenuities in favour of the ballot, to revert to those reasons which long-continued evils have long presented to us, and as it is by repeated appeals to their sense of justice, that the opinion of the people of this country is ultimately influenced, as the ballot is to be carried in the same way in which all the great changes in which we have been the witnesses have been accomplished, and as in those signal instances it was necessary again and again, and session after session, to urge the same obvious motives for the measures which were pressed with a strenuous reiteration upon the parliament and the country; so in this important discussion, the circumstance that an argument has been advanced, or a striking fact has been stated before, furnishes no just reason for not again insisting upon it. I do not, therefore, hesitate to revert in the outset, although it may have been already mentioned, to what took place in reference to the ballot when the Reform Bill was originally propounded. I attach great importance to the facts which ought to put an end to the dispute regarding what is called the finality of the Reform Bill, in reference to the question before the house. The noble lord, the member for London, has been, I think, a good deal misrepresented on this head; for some among his supporters have naturally conjectured that he regarded the Reform Bill as a monument where he should "set up his everlasting rest." But I for one never understood the noble lord to have spoken in the sense ascribed to him. I admit, that if the members of Earl Grey's government had entered into an agreement, that not only no ulterior alteration of the franchise should be ever supported by them, but that, in reference to the mode of exercising it, no change should ever be proposed, that compact, no matter how preposterous, might be plausibly relied upon, against those who were parties to it-against any further movement upon their part, it might be pleaded as an estoppel;

Mr. Grute.

but it can be proved, by eviaence beyond dispute, that as far as the bairot is concerned, no such bargain as has been imputed to the Whig government was ever thought of; the direct contrary of what has been so frequently insinuated is the truth. ♦ committeee of five distinguished men, all of them more or less conspicuous for agitation in the cause of reform, was named by the government to draw up a plan of reform. A scheme was accordingly framed by them, and the vote by ballot formed a part of it. The measure of which the noble lord approved in 1831 cannot be of that immoral and debasing character which its antagonists have sometimes represented it to be. My more immediate purpose, however, in referring to a fact announced by the noble lord himself, is to introduce with greater effect the declaration made by the noble lord on moving to bring in the Reform Bill, in March, 1841. The report in favour of the ballot was not adopted, but it was agreed that upon the question no decision should be formed one way or the other, and that the Reform Bill should be laid before the house without prejudice to the future adoption of the ballot. This was unequivocally declared by the noble lord in his celebrated speech on moving that bill, which, on account of his great services to the cause of freedom, was so appropriately confided to him. I cannot conceive how, after such a declaration, made under such circumstances by the noble lord, in language as clear as the English tongue can supply, there can be any doubt as to the question of fact, namely, that the Reform Bill was not in any way to affect the question of ballot. But in the progress of the bill what befel? When the Chandos clause was proposed, Lord Althorp resisted it, and declared it to be contrary to the spirit of the Reform Bill, and said that it would furnish a strong argument for the ballot. Thus, it appears, that before the Reform Bill was brought forward, the ballot was proposed by certain members of the government. When the Reform Bill was brought forward there was an express reservation in favour of the right of thereafter proposing the ballot, and during the discussion of the measure the leader of the House of Commons deliberately stated that a principle had been grafted on the measure, which altered its character and afforded good grounds for demanding the ballot. Let us follow the bill to the House of Lords. Lord Grey made this most important statement:--He said that the agricultural interest had already been greatly strengthened by the Reform Bill; that the Chandos clause confered on that interest an accession of influence which was excessive and undue, and that that clause, not originally contemplated by the ministry, would furnish strong rea sons for the ballot. Well might Lord Grev have said so He had, in devising the Reform Bill, adhered to his plan of reform orought forward in 1782, and cut the counties of England into sections. This had, it is manifest, the direct tendency to augment the agricultural interest, and to strengthen the influence of individuals in the localities where their property was situated. Lord Grey, however, did not intend that tenants at will, whose subserviency is implied by their designation, should be invested with the franchise; and when he found that this vast addition vas made to the local power of the landed gentry in every county in