and this time passed into law with some alterations. Under this measure the police force was placed under an Inspector-General, who, with an office in Dublin Castle, was in immediate touch with the Government. The selection of the men was nominally vested in the Lord-Lieutenant, but practically in the InspectorGeneral, instead of being, as previously, in the hands of the local magistrates whose personal predilections had been sometimes known to overcome their ardent sense of duty. Constabulary courts were established for the enforcement of discipline, and the discipline itself was rendered stricter. Moreover, a number of stipendiary magistrates were appointed, whose functions were to be similar to those discharged by the Sheriff-substitutes in the counties in Scotland. Under the Inspector-General there were to be four provincial inspectors; under these thirty-five subinspectors, with salaries varying from £230 to £250; next to them the chief constables; then the head constables in two classes, and after them the constables and sub-constables, each of them likewise divided into two classes. The same Act also provided for the appointment of stipendiary magistrates who were not to be appointed magistrates of police, but merely justices of the peace. They were to act in aid of the local magistrates, and supply their place when necessary; but were in no way connected with the police establishment. In this way the magistracy was purged of many of its unpaid Castle creatures, who were replaced by impartial and salaried guardians of the law. In 1839 the whole force numbered 8,416, which was 1,300 more than in 1835; whilst a large number of Catholics had been admitted at Drummond's instance, in order to increase its popularity with the Irish people. In 1846 an Act was passed by which the police force was increased, and taken more immediately into the service of the Crown. Part of the burden of their pay was taken from the shoulders of the Irish counties, and they became practically a portion of the regular army, amounting to 12,000 chosen men, well armed and drilled. The Dublin Police Bill had also been passed in 1836, having been likewise rejected by the Lords the year before. Difficulties, however, arose in providing sufficient funds for the maintenance of the force, and before this obstacle was overcome, a considerable time elapsed, and an amendment to the Act became necessary, so that the Dublin police did not begin to operate until January 1, 1838. By this change Dublin and a certain district round it obtained the services of 1,000 efficient men, the former force having only amounted to between 400 and 500 men, who had been underpaid, miserably clothed, in many cases senile, and all of them grossly inefficient. The effect of the reform soon made itself felt. In 1836 there had been forty-four combination assaults, and in 1837 ninety-seven; whilst in 1839, when the Dublin Police Act had been given sufficient time to make itself effective, there were only nine. In 1839 a Select Committee of the House of Lords, known as the Roden Committee from the circumstance of its appointment on the motion of Lord Roden,1 took evidence as to the state of agrarian and other crime in Ireland between the years 1835 and 1839, and as to the whole policy of the administration in that country in regard to its suppression. The administration, represented by Thomas Drummond, who during those years was the life and soul of the Irish Government, emerged from the scrutiny with increased reputation. Drummond proved in his evidence before the Committee that, taking the mean of crime for the years 1826-8, and comparing it with that for the years 1836-8, and allowing for the increase of the population, there had been a decrease as follows 86% Assembling armed and appearing armed by night ... ... ... Stealing cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and calves ... ... ... 54% There was an increase of common assaults, riots, breaches of the peace, misdemeanours, and larceny; but Drummond showed that the apparent increase of these latter offences was the direct result of the greater activity and efficiency of the police.2 What greater testimony could have been afforded to the wisdom of Drummond's rule in Ireland? He proved that coercion was not the only instrument of Government, nor punishment the only way to make a people law-abiding. That there was nothing so alien in the constitution of the Irish people to distinguish them from the other races of Europe: that they had much the same feelings, a similar capacity for good and evil; and that, if anything, they were more susceptible to kindness, and eager to display their sense of gratitude than even those who tried to govern them. On the fall of Melbourne's administration and Peel's accession to power, crime and outrage recommenced with much of their old vigour, a fact which even the Government found difficult to explain away. To cite two in stances out of many-In 1842, a man named Laffan, who had rendered himself peculiarly offensive to the Ribbon confederacy, was deliberately murdered in broad daylight in the county of Tipperary, a few hours, too, after a meeting of priests and laymen had been held close by the scene of the outrage to condemn the 1 Robert Jocelyn, third Earl of Roden (1788-1870). 2 Appendix XLIXA, Drummond's evidence before the Committee. system of terrorism that prevailed. In the same year Mr. James Scully, a Catholic landlord, was also murdered in Tipperary.1 In 1843 what is known as the "battle of Magheracloon" was fought. The tenants on an estate belonging to Mr. Shirley at Carrickmacross, in the barony of Farney, had refused to pay their rents, and Shirley, determined to exact his due, had sent a driver to distrain the cattle of the recalcitrant tenantry. But the driver was outwitted in his attempts to carry out his master's orders, and so Shirley's bailiff proceeded to placard the chapel of Magheracloon with notices of eviction. Thereupon a riot took place, and the police intervened to preserve order, with the result that one tenant was shot dead and seven others wounded; but the peasantry refused to submit, and so stubbornly did they fight that the police were eventually forced to take to their heels. In the same year, while Mr. Waller, a landed proprietor residing near Nenagh, was sitting at dinner with the members of his family, a band of peasants suddenly burst into the room and savagely attacked him. With the aid of his sons and the servants of the house he offered a stout resistance, but, although the peasants were at last driven off after a sanguinary struggle, Waller himself was beaten to death. It was during this reign of terror that another Arms Act was passed for Ireland. For nearly fifty years a series of such Acts had been continuously in force in that country, but to little purpose. The present measure was passed at the request of a large number of orderly inhabitants. in Ireland, who were compelled by the state of the times to keep arms enough for their own defence, and who dreaded a seizure of them. The Government, however, instead of continuing the last Act passed for the purpose, amended it, and thus roused the Irish to fury. This action was all the more unjust, as England and Wales, which were torn by disorder and discontent, were exempted from the measure. By the Bill of 1843, introduced into the House of Commons by Lord Eliot on May 29, no one in Ireland was to be allowed to carry arms, to sell arms or gunpowder, or to ply the trade of a smith without a licence; and no licence to carry arms was to be granted except on the recommendation of two householders. A smith's licence was forfeitable on his conviction of any misdemeanour. Licensed arms were to be distinguished by a brand, and the constabulary were authorized to search night and day for unbranded arms. Sharman Crawford opposed the Bill, as did various other prominent members. The Rebecca Riots were raging in Wales at that very time, and why, it was urged, had not an Arms Act been passed for that country? The answer was plain, because the Irish were governed on different principles from any other people.2 1 Appendix XLIXB, quotation from the Times, Dec. 6, 1842. 2 Appendix L, extract from speech by Lord Palmerston, and quotation from the German historian, Von Raumer. It was during the discussion upon the Arms Act that Charles Buller prophesied a great coming danger on account of the deterioration in the quality of the potato, but his words fell upon heedless ears in the confused clamour of debate. For the next three years Ireland was a perfect pandemonium of unrest. Growling discontent, seditious gatherings, arson, and murder took infinite pains to demonstrate to statesmen the rottenness of their system and the determination of the Irish to have done with it. In 1844, to mention one out of 1,000 agrarian crimes that year, Mr. Gloster, who had served notices to quit on his tenants in the County Clare, was shot dead without any warning, while driving from an adjoining farm to his own house. The next year Mr. Clarke, another landowner, was shot dead in broad daylight while walking on his own estate in the County Tipperary. Crime was increasing in ten out of the thirty-two Irish counties, and in five out of the ten the increase had assumed dangerous proportions. In these five counties alone in 1845 the cases of and in the rest of Ireland these several crimes amounted during that year to 2,736, making a grand total of 5,638. In 1846 Mr. Carrick was deliberately shot dead while driving from the town of Ennis in the county of Clare to his own house close by. In the single month of November in the latter year the following agrarian outrages were committed. Mr. Lucas, a landed proprietor in the King's County, was shot dead, while walking with a policeman, who had been engaged to protect him, from his herd's house to his own. William Roe, of Rockwell, in the County Tipperary, evicted a tenant named Lonergan, but the tenant brooded over his wrongs, and having awaited a favourable opportunity for revenge shot the evictor through the heart. Major Mahon, of the County Clare, turned a number of tenants out of their holdings and shipped them off to America On the voyage there they endured frightful sufferings, and subsequently sent home harrowing accounts of their condition. On the arrival of these accounts in Ireland, the friends of the wretched outcasts at once determined to inflict upon Mahon a retributory doom. One day, while riding in a closed carriage near his own residence, he was shot dead, and not long afterwards a policeman, who was making inquiries on the spot where Mahon was murdered, suffered a similar fate. Flynn, a Catholic peasant, who had offended against the unwritten law of Ribbonism, was stabbed to death while returning home from the fair of Newtown Hamilton, in the County Armagh. Mr. Hassard, treasurer to the grand jury of the County Fermanagh, was shot dead on his own estate. Mr. Bayley, a landowner and magistrate of the County Tipperary, was fired at while driving near the town of Nenagh, and his jawbone shot away. Walsh, a Catholic caretaker to a Catholic landlord of the County Clare, was shot dead in broad daylight, while walking along the high-road near the town of Scariff. A peasant named Ryan was assaulted in his own house in the County Tipperary by a band of Ribbonmen, and his wife, who heroically flung herself between him and his assailants, was shot dead. Mr. O'Donnell, the agent of the Marquess of Ormonde, was also murdered in the same manner. On the 28th of this terrible month, while the Reverend John Lloyd, vicar of Aughrim, was returning on horseback from service at his parish church to his residence at Smithstown, near Elphin, he was confronted by an armed peasant, who said to him-"Say your prayers, for you're going to be shot." "What have I done," answered Lloyd, "that I should be murdered?" "You put out a tenant two years ago on your estate at Leitrim," replied the peasant, "and I tell you say your prayers, for your hour has come." He then deliberately and without another word levelled his gun, took aim, and fired, and the unfortunate Lloyd fell lifeless from his horse. The Irish were thus being driven into outrage by famine and despair, but the only remedy for it was not cheap bread and better landlords, but a Coercion Bill. Well might the heart of the legislator sink. Disraeli had declared two years before, during the discussions in Parliament in connection with the proceedings at the trial of O'Connell, that "A starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien Church, and the weakest executive in the world-this is the Irish question." But this patent truth was not recognized by the majority of his countrymen, and on January 22, 1846, Peel introduced his Crimes Bill into Parliament, not indeed with the hope of ameliorating the lot of the Irish people, but of rendering their misery inarticulate. The Arms Act already in force was about to expire, and he determined to renew and extend it. The Bill provided that additional police and magistrates were to be appointed in a pro |