too much to find them singing To triumphe-(Te Deum is out of their line) for what they know to be defeat and misfortune, and claiming honours and ovations for having disorganized and endangered every institution of a once great and happy country. Passing, however, from these general but important considerations, let us observe a little on the detail of the measures for which this pamphlet claims such extravagant approbation :— ‘Ireland.—When the present government took office, the storm which had been gathering for the previous half century had burst. The first remedies which they applied were such as, if they had been adopted by their predecessors, might have been sufficient. Measures were adopted for removing the collision between the tenantry and the clergy as to tithes, and for throwing the maintenance of the Establishment upon the landlord ;* public education was made equally accessible to the Catholic and the Protestant; agriculture and manufactures were encouraged; a large fund was appropriated for the promotion of public works; the road to prosperity was opened, if the peaceful and industrious portion of the community could only obtain protection while treading it.'—pp. 5, 6. We will not now rip up old sores, nor stop to inquire who were the men who for half a century had been exciting-creating-the storm. We will abstain from that most tempting topic; but could we, at the very threshold, as it were, offer our readers a better proof of the candour, the veracity, of the pamphleteers than that, after talking about the storm that had for half a century been gathering in Ireland,' they do not make the slightest allusion to what the Whigs had always represented as the sole cause of the storm-Catholic Disabilities; nor to the measure which they had always vaunted and urged as the one, only, certain remedyCatholic Emancipation? Had Lord Brougham and Mr. Spring Rice, the two principal contributors, drank of Lethe in their transit to the Elysium of office, and lost all recollection of the whole course of their political life? Had they forgotten that, on every occasion on which former governments had been obliged to appeal to parliament for some legislative enactments against Irish turbulence, they and their friends. sang one never-ceasing, never-varying chorus-The sole cause of disturbance in Ireland is the penal code-grant Catholic Emanci pation, and none of these coercive and unconstitutional measures will be necessary?' But now, this 'the sovereign remedy for all the diseases of Ireland '—appears so absolutely worthless, that it does not claim even a parenthesis in the history of the half cen * 2d and 3d Wm. IV. c. 119. + An Act for improving certain Waste Lands in Ireland, 2 and 3 Wm. IV. c. 52. ‹ ‡ An Act for the better Regulation of the Linen Manufacture, 2 and 3 Wm. IV. c. 77: tury,' tury,' of which, during the said half century, it appeared to be not merely the most prominent, but the only concern of our domestic life. Is this mere oblivion?' Oh, no! They remember it too well; but nothing could be more inconvenient to the ministry at this moment than to remind even the gentlest reader of the utter failure of that great Whig engine of government-Concession !— nothing more humiliating to the men themselves than to confess that their grand expedient, which was to render all disturbance impossible, and all coercion unnecessary, has been followed by disturbances as frightful as ever, and by coercion ten times more severe, and an hundred times more unconstitutional than ever was dreamed of before. But, in the foregoing enumeration of the remedies by which their Coercion was accompanied, have they forgotten that there is not one single topic which had not engaged the attention of former governments-on which former parliaments had not legislated? the Tithe Composition Bill-the many committees, votes, and measures relating to education-hundreds of acts and of grants for promoting agriculture, and manufactures-and large funds over and over again appropriated for the promotion of public works-measures directed to the self-same objects as those which are now cited as if they had never been thought of till the reform ministers had passed two or three chapters of the second and third of William IV.:' and do they not know that when Sir Henry Hardinge left the Irish office in 1830 he had already prepared, or was preparing for immediate consideration, a greater number of remedial measures for Ireland than the present government with its three Irish Secretaries within two years--have had time even to think of? The pamphlet also takes great credit for the Irish Church Reform Bill-the Irish Church Reform Bill! the act, of all others of their administration, which all men of every party, even of their own, concur in adducing as the chief proof of their ignorance, their vacillation, their temerity, their timidity! We well recollect in what various aspects this celebrated bill was presented both in public and in private. Now Lord Duncannon whispered to one party a confidential something about confiscation of bishoprics; Mr. Stanley plausibly harangued the other on the increased stability of the church: on one side, we heard of relief to a burdened people; on the other, of security to the suffering clergy. The bill has ended in doing almost nothing of what was promised by either class of its promoters; and its sole effect and merit is one that never was avowed,-it has insulted the Irish church. The union of twenty-two dioceses into twelve-(while the temporalities are all preserved to ecclesiastical purposes)-is of little importance, we hope, in a religious, and of less, we believe, in an administrative view of the subject. The confiscation clause was the marrow of the whole proceeding: when that had been juggled out, the bill passed with little comparative interest on the part of either the Catholics or the Protestants, except only that it was gratifying to the former and offensive to the latter, as an insult to the Established Church.* But while their great bill does little more than insult the Irish church, all their minor measures, whether of legislation or administration, seem calculated to plunder and destroy it. The active conspiracy against tithes commenced on their accession to officethey took no measures to arrest or defeat it; nay, when the law, feeble as it was, had convicted and punished two of a higher class of offenders, the government interposed with a remission of the sentence. It is clearly one of the first duties of a government to afford protection to property-tithes were property; and not church property only-they constitute a large proportion of lay property in Ireland. Did, or does the government afford that species of property any protection? Has it not, on the contrary, in a hundred ways contributed to its destruction? Take one example. The Coercion Bill was introduced mainly to protect property;-and as tithe-property was the only class that was avowedly attacked, the letter and the spirit of the bill, as introduced, gave, and were confessedly intended to give, tithe the same protection as other property: --but the enemies of the church objected to this; and, although the ministerial majority in the house was such as to show that there was nothing to apprehend from the hostile party, the ministers, after hesitating a little between the shame of such an act of pusillanimity and injustice on the one hand, and their anxiety to conciliate the enemies of the church on the other-ended by truckling to the latter party, and by adding a proviso at the end of the bill to exclude tithes from the protection it afforded to other property. And these Ministers call themselves a Government! Their merit in passing the Coercion Bill would have been greater in our eyes, if we could forget the causes which rendered that bill necessary if we could obliterate from the parliamentary debates, and from the memory of mankind, the opposition of the present ministers to even the gentlest remedies and the least offensive restrictions proposed by their predecessors-if we could forget that the very leave to bring in a bill for suppressing unlawful societies in *The pamphlet says, Those who look forward with eagerness to Reform in the English Church hailed the measure, not only as an act of justice to Ireland, but as affording some clue to what may be the feelings and conduct of Ministers, when they shall redeem their promise by entering on the arduous task of Church Reform in England.'-p. 8. Is it the measure, as originally proposed, which the eager lookers-forward are to hail, as affording some clue? But who can unravel the next difficulty-is the clue to apply to the feelings' or to the ' conduct?' VOL. L. NO. XCIX. Ireland Ireland was, in the year 1825, combated with the greatest obstinacy by Mr. Rice and Mr. Brougham, Lord Althorp, Lord Duncannon, &c. in a debate which lasted four days, a length, then, we believe, unprecedented in such a stage, and in which the present Lord Chancellor, after having, as Mr. Canning stated it, "gallantly identified himself with the Catholic Association,' concluded by language so orderly, so tranquillizing, so likely to induce Ireland to respect the law, as the following 'I, Sir, am the defender of the Catholic Association'-(every other speaker, almost, we believe, without exception, had censured that turbulent assembly)-I, Sir, am the defender of the Catholic Association; I am the advocate of the right of the Irish people to meet, to consider, to plan, to petition, to remonstrate, to DEMAND!-and my frank opinion, which I trust will reach the whole of Ireland as well as England, is, that the more energetic their remonstrance,' &c. &c.— Par. Deb., Feb. 15, 1825. The act passed, but it was a brutum fulmen—it was evaded and despised. Mr. Brougham's 'opinion' did reach the whole of Ireland, and was acted upon in various shapes and ways till the day when the same man, as Lord Chancellor of England, gave the royal assent to a bill, dispersing with an iron hand all meetings,' and stifling with a tighter than Turkish bowstring all demands' which it should please the Lord Lieutenant to proscribe: and the Lord Lieutenant, charged with the execution of this tremendous law, was the same man who had lately distinguished himself by preaching agitation, and giving all his countenance to similar associations-and they take praise for having tranquillized Ireland! Alas! they drove her mad, and then tried to quiet her with a strait waistcoat! The Abolition of West India Slavery. In the same spirit that confounds a trip to the Nore, with a voyage round the world-one session, with the whole futurity of the country-the pamphleteers congratulate themselves on having abolished West India slavery. 'It is to be extinguished on the 1st of August, 1834. Is not that immediate emancipation?'-p. 12. For our own parts we readily admit our apprehension that it may be so; but even if the slaves should, with their proverbial patience and good sense, await the day of freedom in all tranquillity, is the final suc cess of the measure out of peril-has the Chancellor of the Exchequer the most remote idea where he is to obtain the twenty millions of compensation, or the taxes by which he is to meet the interest of a loan for such a sum-and has the Colonial Secretary any charm to ensure that the untried system of apprenticeship shall be popular with the negro and productive to the planterhas he provided for the care and support of sickness, old age, and infancy, infancy, or where, when apprenticeship expires, the emancipated negro is to find raiment, food, and a habitation? Don Quixote, in his mania for liberating captives, was not so mad as Mr. Stanley; the Don had now and then a grain of common sense in his fancies: for instance, when he says 'Some men turn their negro slaves, when they are old and past service, naked out of doors, under pretence of freedom, to become still greater slaves to cold and hunger; a slavery from which nothing but death can set the wretches free.'-Don Quixote, p. ii. c. 24. A hint which has escaped the pamphleteers increases our doubt and our anxiety on the whole of this matter. It is stated— The certain supply of labour which the apprenticeship provides, although insufficient for the production of the amount of produce now exported from the colonies, will probably be sufficient to prevent the necessity of resorting to the slave colonies of other nations for the supply of that produce.'-pp. 14, 15. Or, in other words, it is probable-only probable-that our own sugar islands, though confessedly rendered less productive, may still produce enough of that article; but if not, it will be NECESSARY, after having ruined our own colonies by the abolition of slavery, to seek for a supply from the slave colonies of other countries. Good God! can any men be so blinded by vanity or by party, as to proclaim that a great question is finally and safely settled, while they confess that it is still liable to such a monstrous contingency? What! are we to give twenty millions of British money, and twenty times twenty millions in eventual sacrifice of colonial property, for the chance of opening our sugar market to the negro-drivers of France or Spain-of Louisiana or the Brazils? The pamphleteers make very light of this to us most alarming admission, and console themselves by adding "The principal advantage of the apprenticeship, however, accrues to the negroes themselves. They are, in fact, placed in a condition of greater comfort than that of the peasantry of any civilized nation.'— p. 15. This last stroke, we confess, confounds us. Why should negroes be placed in a condition of greater comfort than the peasantry of any civilized nation;' above all, why should we actually pay twenty millions, and risk, moreover, a whole colonial empire, to raise them above our own peasantry? We wish the poor negroes all possible protection, and all suitable comfort, and we believe they now enjoy them; but even if it were not so, a plan of emancipation which places an apprenticed negro on half-work in a scale of comfort above our own honest, hard-working, tax-paying English peasantry, is, we have no hesitation in saying, a monster in legislation, morals, and common sense. Q 2 One |