of the latter seven magistrates assembled in special sessions could signify to the Lord-Lieutenant that their county was disturbed. He might then proclaim the county to be in a disturbed state, whereupon every person dwelling in the district was obliged to remain within his own doors between sunset and sunrise. Any justice of the peace could enter any house at night, and declare such of the inmates as were absent to be idle and disorderly persons. All persons administering illegal oaths, demanding arms, having offensive weapons in their possession and refusing to give them up; also all persons, not being travellers, found in a public house, or hawking or dispersing seditious papers, were liable to be considered idle and disorderly. Idle and disorderly persons hawking or dispersing such papers were to be liable to twelve months' imprisonment; whilst idle and disorderly persons committing the other offences were to be liable to transportation for seven years. On the passing of this Act 366 persons were charged at the special Commission in Cork alone, of whom thirty-five were sentenced to death. The taste for coercion was rapidly growing. What ills could not be cured by it? Hunger should be made to smile under its genial influence, and the dull despair of destitution to frolic in its warmth.1

On May 23, 1823, a Bill was introduced in the House of Commons for the renewal of the Insurrection Act. Ministers excused themselves for this apparent harshness with tears in their eyes, but how else could they repress the incorrigible rascality of an ungrateful country? At the second reading, on June 24, Sir Henry Parnell 2 moved for a committee of twentyone members to inquire into the recent disturbances. He recounted how the period since the Union had been stuffed with Coercion Bills and Insurrection Acts. The Insurrection Act of 1796 had been prolonged to 1802. From 1803 to 1805 there had been martial law. The Insurrection Act had been renewed for three years in 1807, again for four years in 1814, and again in 1822. Moreover in many of these years the Habeas Corpus Act had been also suspended. The Arms Act of 1807 and the Peace Preservation Act of 1814 had remained in force since their enactment, and only four years, 1802-3, 1805-6, 1810-11, 1818-19, could be spoken of as having been at all tranquil. But Parnell's motion for a Committee was only supported by thirtynine votes, and the Insurrection Act was carried by a majority of forty-nine. The next year a Committee was appointed to inquire into the causes of Irish crime; and after sitting for

1 Appendix XLIV, quotations from Charles Grant and the Edinburgh Review. 2 Henry Brooke Parnell, first Baron Congleton (1776-1842). Succeeded Charles Watkin Williams-Wynn as Secretary at War in Grey's Administration in 1831. Appointed Treasurer of the Navy and Paymaster-General of the Forces, 1835.

several years laid its report in 1827. Some of the evidence given before the Committee is instructive. Francis Blackburn, afterwards Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, and then LordChancellor of Ireland, was examined among other persons, and, having described various cases of landlord persecution, mentioned. an incident on the estate of Lord Stradbrook

"The agent, attended by the sheriff, went upon the land, dispossessed a numerous body of occupants; they prostrated the houses, leaving the people to carry away the timber. The number of persons that were thus deprived of their houses on that occasion was large. I am sure that there were about forty families, but I cannot tell you the number of individuals. They were persons of all ages and sexes, and in particular, a woman almost in the extremity of death."2

And these were the landlords who represented the policy of the rulers of Ireland; these the men whom it was of paramount importance to shelter from every rude blast of opinion; whose integrity no man might question, lest he should be deemed a villain. These were the Christians who, leaving the people to carry away the timber, were to be mercifully spared the indignity of reproach. How long were they going to ride roughshod over the feelings of their fellow-creatures? Was there anything so intrinsically excellent about these men, that they, and they alone, should be allowed to insult humanity with impunity? Or was their turn coming, when they would be made to feel the rod of justice and the heel of passionate contempt? Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.

Between 1824 and 1829 there was a lull in the Whiteboy agitation; but the condition of Ireland during this period of comparative peace may be gathered from Peel's description of the country in the speech which he delivered on the introduction of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1829. He said

"A dreadful commotion distracts the public mind of Ireland; a feverish agitation and unnatural excitement prevails, to a degree scarcely credible. Social intercourse is poisoned there in its very springs; family is divided against family, and man against his neighbour; in a word, the bonds of social life are almost dissevered, and the foundations of public justice corrupted. The spirit of discord walks openly abroad, and array of physical force is marshalled in defiance of all law, and to the imminent danger of the public peace."

This was the condition of the country during a period of relative tranquillity, and the only known remedy for it was brute force. Michael Thomas Sadler, a Tory of the Tories, writing in 1829 in his Ireland, its Evils, and their Remedies, of

1 Appendix XLV, questions and answers.

2 Appendix XLVI, quotations from Mr. Justice Day and G. Cornewall Lewis.

the proposal to solve the Irish difficulty by thinning Ireland by emigration and monopoly, observed

"In closing my remarks . . . I would put one or two plain questions. Is a system, which can only be supported by brute force, and is kept up by constant blood-shedding, to be perpetuated for ever? Are we still to garrison a defenceless country in behalf of those whose property was, generally speaking, originally conferred on the special condition of residence, but whose desertion occasions all the evils under which she has groaned for centuries?-property so treated, that it would not be worth a day's purchase were the proprietors its sole protectors. But they are aware that their absence is balanced by the presence of a body of military and police, which enables them to conduct themselves with as little apprehension as remorse. The possessions of the entire empire would be lost to their owners, were such conduct general; and are these so meritorious a class, that their utmost demands are to be extorted from a distant and suffering country, and themselves protected in the open neglect, or rather audacious outrage, of all those duties, on the due and reciprocal discharge of which the whole frame of the social system is founded? If they persist in this course, let them do so, but let it be at their proper peril! Let them urge their own claims, and defend their own outrages: the British soldier, who is ready to bleed in the battle in which his country's interest or honour is at stake, is too noble a being, methinks, to be degraded virtually into the exactor of the enormous rents of the absentee, which his desertion often incapacitates the wretched tenants from discharging, or to 'clear' his estates of human beings, when it may please him to utter the fiat from afar. I say I would leave them to settle this as they could, only that it would be practically difficult to sever their case from such as have fair claims upon public protection."

This is what has been so often forgotten. For several hundreds of years the rulers of Ireland had been employing every conceivable method of persuasion to enable the landlord to exploit his property in Ireland regardless of the welfare of those who had to live on it. All the recorded and unrecorded misery, all the legal cruelty, all the rebellion, all the vast treasure poured out, all the bloodshed had been directed to this cardinal object to keep a set of men upon the soil who exhausted its resources without adding to it a particle of value in return, or caring a tittle either for the men who dug their daily bread from it, or the country of which it formed a part. The rulers of Ireland had paid dearly for their motherly solicitude for this swarm of drones. They had planted them in Ireland, and their parental pride had forbidden them to criticize those for whom two centuries back they had robbed, and murdered, and transported. What use were these fatted calves to any one? They refused to work; they neglected their duties towards the men whose lives and families depended upon their whim; and they

would not, many of them, even live in the country of their adoption. But for this minority, for this thorn that stuck and festered in the side of Ireland, her rulers were prepared to go any lengths. The whole of their Parliamentary business might remain at a standstill; political parties might tear themselves to pieces; the greater part of Ireland be convulsed in insurrection and outrage; their reputation abroad for wise government and Christian charity be dragged in the mire; their peace of mind embittered and at length destroyed; and every page of their history stained with the disgrace of their Irish rule, so long as a small minority could be maintained unreformed and undisturbed upon those lands which had been torn from their natural owners to stuff their rapacity, and from which that minority's only ambition was to squeeze as much advantage to themselves with as little danger and trouble as possible. As long as they floated it mattered little who sank.

The Whiteboy agitation again broke out in 1830. Belgium had in that year succeeded in wrenching herself free from Holland, and this triumph of national liberty inspired the discontents of Ireland with hope. Between 1830 and 1835, Whitefeet, Blackfeet, Terryalts, the Lady Clares, the Molly Maguires, and the Rockites swarmed over the country. Some of the rioters were under the orders of Captains "Starlight" and "Moonlight," and carried out their commands with as much regularity as any regiment under strict discipline. Like the English Chartists, the Whiteboys formulated their demands, insisting upon a reduction of rents, undisturbed occupation of their holdings by tenants, and an increase of labourers' wages. As their claims were not conceded, not even favoured by the most casual consideration of the Government, they had recourse to crime. A couple of characteristic incidents, out of an immense number during the five years from 1830 to 1835, will suffice to show the temper of the times. In 1830 a man named Maddox took a farm from which the previous occupier had been evicted. Two years later, when the first rumble of ominous disapproval had spent its force and Maddox was comfortably installed, his house was suddenly attacked by a band of Whiteboys, who had only held their hands until a favourable opportunity presented itself. Two constables, who had been placed in the house to protect him, were killed outright, and he himself, his wife, and two sons seriously wounded. About the same time Mr. Marum, of the County Kilkenny, evicted the tenants on an estate which he had taken on lease. For the next three years he was mercilessly pursued by the Whiteboys; his cattle was constantly houghed, and his own life rendered an unceasing anxiety. At length, after being harassed by his implacable foes to such an extent that life must have become a burden to him, he was deliberately shot dead in his own yard in the open day, and in

the presence of his family and servants. Is it not inconceivable that year after year the nauseous draught of coercion should have been administered to the gasping Irish patient, whilst food and clothing and the common decencies of existence were denied to him; whilst, ground to powder by a relentless aristocracy, he was often forced to rest his head upon a stone pillow and grate his bones upon the bare ground?1

Defenderism, as will be remembered, was directed against the Ulster Peep o' Day Boys, and the latter movement had gradually developed into Orangeism, which the Defenders continued to combat. In 1820 Ribbonism in its turn developed out of Defenderism; and between 1835 and 1849 the Ribbon movement became a tenants' protective league. Meanwhile outrages continued to be of almost daily occurrence. In 1835 Lord Lorton evicted nine Catholic tenants on his estate near the village of Ballinamuck in the county of Longford, and put in their place nine Protestant occupiers-Brock, Diamond (1), Alexander Moorhead, Cole, Cathcart, Diamond (2), Rollins, Hugh Moorhead, and William Morrison. One by one they expiated the fault of the noble evictor. Brock was killed in June close to his own house, and almost in the presence of the villagers. Diamond (1) was attacked and terribly beaten, one of his eyes was knocked out, and he was wholly disabled for life. Alexander Moorhead's entire stock of cattle were driven by night into the adjoining county of Leitrim, and there killed, skinned, and flung into bog-holes. Cole was stabbed and beaten almost to death. Cathcart was fired at several times, and finally shot dead, within a stone's throw of his own house. Diamond's (2) cattle were maimed and destroyed; and those belonging to Rollins were killed, skinned, and thrown into bogholes. Hugh Moorhead was murdered, and William Morrison suffered the same fate. For this terrible example Lord Lorton razed the village of Ballinamuck to the ground, and the wretched inhabitants, many of them entirely innocent, were cast adrift to perish, for all he cared, of hunger and disease. About the same time, Mr. Lundy Foot, a landed proprietor in the County Cork, was murdered in broad daylight, while walking in a field within five hundred yards of his own house. This state of affairs was unfortunately not remedied by a pure administration of justice. Thomas Drummond, the Under-Secretary, wrote to his mother in July 1836

Grossly have the local magistrates abused their power, in many, very many instances; but their wings are clipped, and I hope and believe there is some chance of justice being better administered soon, and ultimately of being well administered. The confidence of the people will be regained; though given to

1 Appendix XLVII, quotations from Sir G. Cornewall Lewis and Poulett Scrope.