that it usurps the functions of government; that it exasperates party hatred; that it interferes with the administration of justice; that it calumniates the character of every respectable man in the country; that it paralyses the magistracy; that it keeps the people, through the instrumentality of priests, in a state of servile vassalage, ready to obey their orders, however dangerous; and that it levies a tax upon the people, to be converted to their own mischievous purposes, no matter what they are.' Of what those purposes are, Mr. Dawson, in the same speech, produced indications sufficiently clear, and avowals, more or less explicit, afforded or made by the Association itself, its agents, and its ringleaders. The Association, when it apprehended from the government an exertion of vigour which was not made, exhorted the people to wait in the sullen silence of discontent for a more favourable opportunity and better-organized resources, to prove to Britain and the world that they were men, and deserved to be free.' "Hereditary bondsmen,' said Mr. O'Connell to those who are, indeed, held in a worse than Egyptian bondage by their priests,

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.'

'Scotland,' he tells them, did not exhibit the patience and self-control of Ireland, nor patiently suffer herself to be trampled on, while her

oppressors rode by in triumph. She hewed down, with the sword of the Lord, the archbishops and bishops; and when the force of the British arms became too strong for her people, they retired to their mountains, and after renovating their vigour, they returned to carry desolation to the very dwelling of their assailants.' 'He would not,' he said, 'press the introduction of the claim of arming the Roman Catholics,-for, if he did, it might be supposed they were going to proclaim war at once.' One priest advises his parishioners to contribute largely to the Catholic rent, because money is the sinew of war, and because that rent will supply the Association with those sinews, whenever the proper occasion should present itself. And another priest informs the Association that many of his parishioners have sworn to appropriate the whole of the corn-crop to the payment of the rent, (observe, the Catholic-not the landlord's rent!) no matter what other creditors may be justly entitled to,or even the wants of nature may imperiously demand. Well, indeed, might Mr. Dawson say, that the Catholic Association is the most dangerous and most mischievous body which has ever been suffered to exist in Ireland.' Truly has he said, that its proceedings, and the speeches of its members, and the agency of the priests, unite in making it the most dangerous of all engines for working upon the passions of such a people as the Irish.' 'It commands a paid

press' (in England, we may add, as well as in Ireland) to circulate its poison through every part of the country; it has actors who stick at no falsehood to alienate the people from their confidence in every established institution of the country; and the priests have amply fulfilled the expectations of the Association, by their undisguised expressions of hostility to the constitution, and by their unceasing efforts to instil the same hatred into an ignorant and infatuated peasantry; a peasantry too truly described, not only as the most ignorant and the most deluded in the world, but also as the most ready, tools for any work of blood!' And wherefore are they so? Not because the Roman Catholics are excluded, by the constitution of these kingdoms, from seats in Parliament, and from some forty offices, but because no other peasantry throughout Christendom is at this time so grievously and grindingly oppressed by the landholders; and because their aptitude for becoming the instruments of mischief and murder is, as it were, the original sin of the race; their unhappy inheritance; the national crime and the national curse. Let the reader turn to the authentic annals, of Ireland-to the history of that ill-fated country, not merely before the restrictions which are now complained of, or the penal laws, were known, but before an English conqueror ever set foot upon its shores-let him look to the ages when, in the language of a villanous incendiary, sovereign Ireland enjoy

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ed her wholesome days of buxom independence,' and he will find, in every page of those annals, three words, wherein the ancient and modern history of Ireland, from the earliest to the latest times, is comprised; the words areoccisio, combustio, devastatio. Never,' says Peter Walsh--an Irishman himself, a Roman Catholic, and a Franciscan friar-never has any other nation upon earth anneared the Milesian race (inhabiting Ireland) in the most unnatural, bloody, everlasting, destructive feuds that have been heard, or can well be imagined:such feuds as not only had for necessary concomitants the greatest pride, most hellish ambition, and cruellest desire of revenge; but also had for no less necessary consequents the most horrible injustice, oppressions, extortions, rapine, desolations of the country, perfidiousnesses, treasons, rebellions, treacheries, murders; and all this from time to time, for six and twenty hundred years, only a very few lucid intervals of the frenzy excepted. Never have we read of any other people in the world so implacably, so furiously, so eternally set upon the destruction of one another.'

"To such a nation it is that the men who purchase for themselves brazen opinions, and those of whom brazen opinions are purchased, address their inflammatory harangues. The Irish are told that the present fearful state of their country has been produced by eagerness to obtain redress from an intolerable wrong, which, as it

affects millions, millions have combined to be relieved from.' They, and that part of the English public whom the agitators seek either to dupe or to confirm in their dupery, are told that "it is not merely religion by itself, or civil liberty, that is at stake-but the contest is one for Catholicism, embittered by Hibernicism, and fermented by the growing leaven of democracy, against Protestant pride, Protestant power, Protestant avarice, Protestant insult, Protestant menace-at last, rendered desperate, it is armed against Protestant heresy.' Dr. Doyle has read somewhere nihil profici patientia nisi ut graviora tanquam ex facilé tolerantibus imperentur; and he tells his countrymen that he is reminded, by the Tithe Composition Bill, of the truth contained in this observation. An English newspaper says to them, 'Patience never did any good in this world, and never will. We must fight for all that is valuable; and as it is a condition of our existence that rest can only be enjoyed after labour, so in like manner we can have no good without a struggle. John Bull must be constantly poked in the ribs.' The Irish -the associated, organised, and disciplined Roman Catholic Irish-the sworn and banded Rockites and Ribbonmen, are told that the crime of being too passive under the weight of murder, spoliation, indignities, insults, and persecutions, which they have endured for centuries, is the chief accusation to be urged against them!'