good will; to induce men to confederate in the support of the law, instead of arraying themselves against it; to remove the old and almost inveterate grudge to Protestantism, and the country from which it has been imported; to associate the Catholic clergy with the State, to pave the way for education, and to render us a moral, a religious, a peaceful, a united, an instructed, and English people?" These questions were put to me with a strength and energy of interrogation, to which I should have found it difficult to make any sort of effective response, when, fortunately for me, three of the little children of my friend entered the room, and at once furnished me with a reply. They approached their father, and straight began to climb his knees in the usual emulative spirit of endearment, in order to share the kiss, which was the object of their infantine competition. While the eldest, a girl of eight years of age, with beautiful eyes, and with her fine flaxen hair streaming over her shoulders and temples, was gaining the height for which she struggled, and fastening her arms, like tendrils, round the neck of her father, who, while he affected to push her away, was all the while helping her up to his embrace, I advanced, and laying my hand upon the child in such a way as to startle her, while she shrank back into the bosom of her father, I said, "What has Emancipation done for Ireland? You have the answer at your heart. It has saved your home from profanation-barred the doors of your house against rapine and against massacre-given you leave to hold your children in your bosom without trembling at the fate which lately impended over them-given you a security that the earnings of your honourable industry will descend to your offspring without the chances of spoliation, and afforded you a just ground for the conviction, that as the peace of your country has been secured against the tremendous hazards to which it was exposed, your children will grow up in the midst of happiness and of plenty, and in place of being the victims, as they were recently likely to be, of a terrific struggle, which, though delayed for years, was still receiving every day the ingredients of acceleration, will be safe from every peril; and when you are dead, (though you will not be altogether gone while they remain,) will be exempt from those calamities of which even the anticipated possibility is a disaster in itself."

This was my reply. Many of my readers may, at the first perusal, deem it to be fraught with exaggerated matter; but let them pause a little, and looking back, and as far as it can be done with calmness and a cool and tranquil spirit, at what has befallen, let us endeavour to ascertain whether already Emancipation has done nothing for Ireland.

But a few months ago, in what condition were we placed? There was a time, and it has only just gone by, when the man who was bold enough to state that the country was upon the verge of convulsion, would have provoked the Attorney-General, and called down his exofficio terrors upon his head. It is not very surprising that the Government should have listened to those dismal announcements with great disrelish, and should have been unwilling that truths so formidable should be told. At present, however, in pointing to the danger which has been escaped, we have a deeper consciousness of our security, and the rolling of the waves makes us only feel the firmness of the shore from which we survey their tremendous agitation.

In my opinion, and I have had some means of forming a correct estimate of the condition of the country, the state of Ireland was, before the settlement of the great question, terrible indeed. The local Government had been entirely superseded. A power had arisen, under the name of the Catholic Association, whose democratic influence, exercised through the medium of the sacerdotal confederation which had been brought into alliance, engrossed all authority. No representative assembly ever presented to the people a more faithful and express image of themselves. They were delighted with a government which, in truth, consisted of themselves, or was, at least, the condensed and concentrated spirit of the seven millions over which it exercised an undisputed and absolute sway. The Lord-Lieutenant and his secretary, and all the inferior machinery of the ordinary executive, together with the crown officers and the judges, were held at nought, when compared with the formidable Association, whose harangues were proclamations, and whose resolutions were law. From the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear, the two extremities of the country, there prevailed a sentiment of deep and imperturbable unanimity; and it is now useless to disguise it, that of that unanimity, a profound detestation of England, and a longing for retribution, were among the principal constituents. In the South of Ireland, under pretence of assembling for the purposes of reconciliation, the peasantry met in bodies, which men accustomed to the calculation of the materials of which large masses are composed, estimated at twenty thousand men. The North presented a spectacle as strange, and even more alarming. Mr. Lawless, without, I believe, intending to produce any such effect, gathered about him an assemblage of the Roman Catholic population, which exceeded any which had ever before been collected in Ireland; and, but for the providential interposition of his own well-grounded apprehension of the consequences, this amazing body would have advanced upon their antagonists, and upon their first shock would have created a civil war. All this while the eyes of France and America were fixed upon Ireland. The journals of the former country teemed with paragraphs announcing the weakness to which England was reduced in this most vulnerable portion of her dominions; and the leading speakers in the Chamber of Deputies did not hesitate to declare that an invasion would not only be justifiable as a measure of retaliation, but would be attended with a certain success. In America, the whole population were brought into sympathy with Ireland; and not only were the Irish refugees (a most active and powerful, as well as most vindictive set of men,) animated with all the zeal which the recollection of their supposed injuries had produced, but the great mass of the Republic was agitated with a strong feeling of interest for a country in which their national antipathy to England would be likely to find an aliment. The wrongs of the Irish Catholics made their way as far as Canada and Nova Scotia, and the allegiance of the Colonies was affected by the contagion, which extended itself beyond the Atlantic. He must be a sceptic, indeed, who can hesitate with respect to the results which must have ensued from such a condition of things. Invasion, civil war, and a massacre, upon a large scale, of the hated cast, would have inevitably taken place. Scarce a single gentleman in Tipperary, and in the other Southern counties, would have escaped. More than the ordinary horrors of civil war would have

attended the movement of an enormous mass of the peasantry, who would have simultaneously arisen together, and, for a season at least, have swept all the mounds and boundaries of civilization before them. The cataract would have been, for a long while, irresistible; and, in its progress, all that is dear, and valuable, and good, and useful, would have been carried down the gulf, into which it would have been ultimately lost. What would have succeeded these events it is difficult to conjecture. It is not unlikely that England would have reconquered the desolation which her policy would have produced, and the desert to which Ireland would have been reduced, would have been subdivided amongst soldiers and adventurers in an universal confiscation. Or perhaps France would have laid her grasp upon this unfortunate country under the forms of an alliance, and established a HibernoGallican Procónsulate at the Castle; or the people might have been left to themselves, and, raising an absolute democracy out of the ruins of every established institution, have built up a system of government, where the shouts of the multitude would have furnished a legislature, and the guillotine would have provided a prompt executive; and of which the only advantage would have been, that each successive faction that got possession of authority, would, by inflicting justice upon their predecessors, have afforded a precedent for its salutary extension to themselves.

The danger of these calamities has happily passed away, and if no other good had been attained, or were likely to be achieved, still the security in which we are at present placed, would afford a noble refutation of the disingenuous sophistries of those who insist that no benefit has as yet resulted from the measure, and who see, in the present state of things, nothing but a verification of their dismal and ominous announcements. I am far from meaning to say that strong emotion does not still exist amongst all classes, and that we are still in an exceedingly uneasy condition, which it will require both wisdom and time, the ally of wisdom, to relieve; but the passions which continue to be felt are no more than the innocuous commotion which agitates the surface of the waters in the anchorage where we are moored at last; and where, although the vessel may continue to toss, and its heaving may be attended with discomfort, yet there is no real danger to be apprehended, and there is no hazard that a single cable will be slipped, or that the vessel will be blown back into the deep. The asperities of party have not altogether subsided, but the revolutionary tendencies are entirely gone by. The Protestants of Ireland may be dissatisfied at the sudden and unexpected equalization with those over whom they had exercised an ascendency, to which habit had attached the attributes of a secondary nature. The Roman Catholics, upon the other hand, may feel that as yet they have not received any individual proofs that a considerable alteration in the system of patronage has taken place. Their craving for office, which is proportioned in its violence to the extent of its duration, has not been appeased. But although this overanxious solicitude for place, attended with a suspicion, not unnatural in men who have been so often disappointed, that the course of practical exclusion is to continue, may work for the present in a way which is more annoying than it is injurious; yet there can be no doubt that a feeling of loyalty, in the true and genuine signification of the word,

has begun to diffuse itself; and, even at this moment, I am convinced that, although a few months only have elapsed since the time that all Ireland was ready to start, at a signal, to arms, an attempt to seduce the great body of the people from their allegiance to the empire, would utterly fail. I do not hesitate to declare it as my deliberate opinion, formed from opportunities of most minute and extensive observation, that if, before the Catholic Question had been adjusted, a small body of foreign forces, with a considerable supply of arms, had effected a descent upon the Irish coast, the great mass of the nation would have instantly joined them; and I am equally confident, that if a great army of invaders were, under existing circumstances, to make so rash an experiment, the peasantry would not co-operate in such an undertaking; and there is scarcely a Roman Catholic in the country raised beyond the debasement of agrarian serfship, who would not rally under the standards of the State, and readily expose his life in the preservation of those liberties, in which every Irishman now bears an equal, and, I may venture to call it, a glorious participation.

It must not, however, be imagined that while I am thus enthusiastic, (for as I write, I feel myself a good deal excited by the preposterous averment that Emancipation has done nothing for Ireland,) and while I thus zealously point out the advantages which have been gained by this transition from the most imminent hazard to a perfect safety, upon that account I am insensible to the existence of the evils which still continue, and that I do not think it necessary to adopt very speedy and efficacious means, in order to give completion to the work which has been effected. Not only much, but what is almost incalculably useful, has been already effected; but it is not because a great deal has been accomplished that little remains to be performed. To adopt the illustration which I have previously ventured to employ, although the vessel is in her moorings, yet she requires to be refitted; there is no risk of her going down, but her rigging must be repaired; full many a rotten plank, which had well nigh let in destruction, must be struck boldly out; and although a great part of her framework must remain, yet, when she is put into the stocks, she must be newly timbered. Great, although they should be gradual, alterations are required in the whole system by which the country has been ruled; the spirit of Catholic Emancipation must be diffused and dispersed into every department of the state, and into every recess of the executive-it must pervade the whole frame and body of the administration; it must be worked into the essence and being of the Government. It must be found every where-at the desks of office; on the bench of justice; at the green tables in the courts; in the boxes of the jury, and of the sheriff; in the treasury, the custom-house, and the Castle; nay, it must appear in the village school-room and in the police-man's barrack. In every public department, and in almost every walk of society, and every path of life, the great moral and political change must be demonstrated; and then, and only then, will all the useful consequences which it is calculated to create be fully developed.

Let it not be conceived, that, when I inculcate the necessity of embodying Catholic Emancipation in palpable and substantive acts, I mean to convey that an ascendency over Protestantism, or even a perfect equality with the religion of the state, is my object. I am well aware that the fee-simple of Ireland is in the hands of the adherents to the Esta

blishment. As I write without any feeling of partizanship-as, at all events, I do my best to divest myself of it (and it is not always easy to do so)-it is only consistent with the end which I propose to myself to admit, that if I were to travel as interpreter to an Englishman from north to south, and from east to west, in Ireland, until every county had been traversed, and in passing beside a fine mansion and the walls of a beautiful demesne, I were to be asked to whom the noble trees, the long avenues, the green park belonged? in nearly nineteen instances out of twenty, I should answer that the proprietor was a Protestant. The truth is, that even to this day, the greater proportion of the land abides in Cromwellian or Williamite ownership. This being the case, it were idle to maintain that the Protestants of Ireland, few indeed in number, but engrossing so large a proportion of the opulence of the country, ought not to engage the attention of the Government, and should not be allowed a certain preponderance in the state. If no sort of regard were to be paid to the religion of individuals, yet in the allocation of the honours and emoluments which are at the disposal of the Government, its patronage would naturally flow into Protestant channels, if station and connexion were to be permitted to give it an influence. Many years, indeed, must go by before such a diffusion of wealth among the Catholic body will take place, and Protestant property will be so broken up, as to give to the professors of the faith of the country a title to individual favour superior to that of those who profess the creed of the state. The majority of persons who hold office, no matter in what department, will be Protestant. The Bench and the Bar of Ireland (a body which exercises a vast control over the national mind) must be filled of necessity from that portion of the population which is most wealthy and intelligent. The same observation applies to every profession, and every class of offices which are connected with the Government; and if the plan of purposed and meditated exclusion be wholly abandoned, still the larger mass of property which is in the possession of Protestants must insensibly draw to it, by the attraction which it is always sure to exercise, the favours of the state. I have thus conceded in the outset that no violent disturbance should take place in the general order of our institutions; but while I have made this admission, I think that it will be readily perceived, by an impartial and soberminded person, uninfluenced by the passions with which it is so difficult in Ireland to avoid being impregnated, that this continuance of a modified Protestant ascendency is perfectly compatible with measures which will have the effect of raising the Catholic body into legitimate association with the state, and, instead of shaking the foundations of existing institutions, will, on the contrary, give them strength and permanence, by showing their consistency with the national interests, and by maintaining the system upon which they lean, and of which they are considered by many to constitute an essential part.

Having, then, laid it down as a principle that a certain ascendency must be maintained, it remains to be determined what measures should be adopted, which will be at once perfectly reconcilable with the modified predominance, and will, at the same time, bring the great body of the nation into genuine and close adhesion to the state. I am of opinion that, to preserve a well-regulated ascendency, nothing is requisite but to leave that ascendency alone. Property itself will work its own