THE CRIMES AND CONFISCATIONS OP THE RUSSELL WHIGS IN IRELAND, ILLUSTRATED IN LETTERS TO THE RT. HON. THE EARL OF DERBY, ETC., ETC. HORACE HOPE. LETTER I. “ That isle is now all desolate and bare, Its dwellings down, its tenants passed away.”— Byron. “ Trop grande simplicity dans la legislation est l’ynnemie de la propriete.”— Napoleon. “ It is strange that judges should have noted favourites, which cannot but cause multiplication of fees' and suspicion of by-ways — Bacon. “ What has occurred once may occur again. Your Lordship is not so little acquainted with history, as not to know that the most corrupt and profligate acts have been committed by judges.”— John Rich ards. DUBLIN JAMES M C GLASHAN, 50 UPPER SACKYILLE-ST, 1852. Dublin •. Printed by George Drought, 6, BachelorVwalk. liitmtmttuttl The Writer cannot avoid expressing his acknowledgments for the suggestions and assist¬ ance he has received in the composition of these sheets, from the articles on Ireland, by the Right Hon. J. W. Croker, which have appeared in the Quarterly Review; and from the Essays on Protective Policy, by Sir Archibald Alison, in Blackwood's Magazine. 53322 tiie CRIMES AND CONFISCATIONS OF THE RUSSELL WHIGS IN IRELAND. •-- LETTER. I. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF DERBY, ETC. My Lord, —A Minister of the house of Russell inflicted on Ireland the latest of her many confiscations. Confis¬ cations have ever been constant episodes in our annals ; the confiscations of former days fell upon those, who, in the language of the iron ordinance of Cromwell, of 1652, “ had contrived, countenanced, or aided in rebellions, murders, and massacres.” The greatest of all political philosophers declares, “ that the land was then put up to a mean and scandalous auction in every goldsmith’s shop in London, or chopped in pieces, and cut into rations, to pay the mer¬ cenary soldiery of a regicide usurper.”* In a succession of similar scenes attendant upon civil and religious wars, frequent and remorseless as no other country ever endured, it might have been hoped that Ireland had fulfilled her evil destiny. The confiscation scheme, however, of our times, improv¬ ing upon the atrocities of the past, after a long and profound peace, in the beneficent reign of the Matron Queen, exterminates the ancient and loyal families, despoils * Burke’s Letter to his Son. G the rightful proprietor of the soil, and annihilates the treasured earnings of humbler industry. Its effects glare upon us through the chasms of surrounding ruin, in universal panic, fatal alike to property—to population : the one it depresses below the standard of half its former value ; the other it scatters over the earth to an extent without precedent in the annals of the world, since a doom equally appalling blasted and dispersed the children of Israel! Former confiscations found the land previously depopu¬ lated by the sword, and forfeited at least by the semblance of existing law. Impatient of the calm and well-regulated discipline of legal justice, the confiscation scheme of Russell reaches the proprietor in his peaceful home, resident on his estates, attainted only of the treason of participation in general distress. It disinherits not only the inheritor, but it embraces in its extinguishment the claims, perhaps the all, of the confiding creditor, the dowried widow, and the portioned child. Well has Sir James Mackintosh ob¬ served, “ that it is far easier to do mischief than to repair it, and that it is one of the malignant consequences of extensive confiscation that it is irreparable.”* Who, during the eventful period, when, in the language of a distinguished author, “ the sword and the sceptre of Europe were in one hand—when hosts more numerous than the Crusaders—an empire more powerful than the Roman—talents and force such as never before were united, were associated against us ;”f who, in the long and fearful struggle with the colossal power of Republican and Imperial France, reared with their fortunes and cemented with their blood the triumphal arch of British greatness ? Our warlike annals answer—the gentry and peasantry of Ire¬ land. Where is that gentry now ? Where is that peasantry ? Exterminated, exiled, gone !! The tide of time seems to be rolling back, in its cycles, perils as alarming as those we have survived. Can the hearts and the hands that * History of England. t J. W. Croker—Past and Present State of Ireland. 7 sustained England in the dangers she has passed be replaced ? Lord John Russell is an historian. In tracing the lineage of his ancestry, this scion of the House of Bedford must have discovered, that the acquirement of their terri¬ torial possessions, in extent almost regal, by the plunder of what he designates “ a debased, degraded, and undone people,” had been immortalised in the gorgeous pages of our great countryman, Edmund Burke !—a name that long after its owner has mouldered into dust, rises higher and higher to the meridian of its glory. He must there have learned, that in the brutal times of Church confiscation in England, “ the grants to the house of Russell were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to startle credibility ; that the Duke of Bedford was the leviathan amongst all the creatures of the Crown ; that the first peer was raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. ; that as there was generally some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was, in all likelihood, much such another as his master ; that the lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting ; that having tasted once the food of con¬ fiscation, the favourite became ravenous ; that his grants were the aggregated and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal , surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.” * Amidst domains thus obtained, now the family inheri¬ tance, was Lord John Russell born. When in his boy¬ hood he surveyed their amplitude, he naturally sought and learned the story of their acquirement. The instincts of our nature are often hereditary, easily susceptible of early impressions ; that instinct, those impressions, may have prompted him in emulating the example of such an ances¬ tor, to seek as a Minister an equally odious immortality, by the creation of a system and a Court whose conception and whose career may be truly designated, “ iniquitously legal! !” * Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord, 1796.—See Note A. 8 “ Great men,” observes Burke, “ never do great mischief, but for some great end.” Take the converse : Little men will ever do so for some little end ! Bussell borrowed the conception of the law for the summary transfer of estates in Ireland from the ancient and rightful owners, from some hireling Whig—perhaps from Sir Charles Trevelyan, on his return from his Indian achievements. In 1844, prior even to the anticipations of famine, the great organ of his party proposed to regenerate Ireland thus :—“ By a revo¬ lution which should destroy or banish its aristocracy, con- liscate their property, and convert the occupiers into pro¬ prietors.” It confessed, however, “that this plan would require centuries. There are no classes that accumulate so slowly as small proprietors and landlords. The first want the power—the second the motive.”* Bussell determined to effectuate, in the short segment of a parliamentary ses¬ sion, these iniquitous designs, which even their vicious author contemplated would be the work of centuries ! Tre¬ velyan, transplanted to the Treasury, brought with him all the qualities for which he had acquired so reputable a re¬ nown in the East. The scheme was grasped at by them as a contrivance for exacting those advances made in the hour of national tribulation, and afterwards flagitiously cast, as her separate debt, on Ireland. By the extinction of her aristocracy and higher gentry—by the engendering in their stead, “from trade’s unfeeling train,f” of a class of land- hucksters, a mean and servile proprietary, it was hoped that the latter would be more slavishly subservient to the mandates of authority : they at least would become pur¬ chasers, subject to the claim, however iniquitous. Muffled, therefore, in the cloak of zeal for the revenue of England, Bussell stabbed the heart of Ireland. “ A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve,” declares Burke, “ would be my standard of a statesman.” This act of the Legislature, on the contrary, conferred a power, like the evil principle, to subvert and to destroy. To accelerate the velocity of its capacity for mischief was the * Edinburgh Review, January, 1844, p. 196. f Goldsmith. 9 ambition of its framer. The perverse dexterities of the expert poacher were imitated in its contrivances to entangle property in its meshes. For the extinction of rights and families in its operation, was exemplified the summary sim¬ plicity of the garotte. “ When I see,” again observes Burke, “ simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new institution, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally ne¬ glectful of their duty.”* What an emphatic commentary on the profound philosophy thus expressed do we find in the vast capacity of Napoleon, “ whose legislative efforts,” according to Macaulay, “are monuments of his wisdom and his vigour, more imperishable, as time has already proved, and as he himself proudly foretold, than all his victories”:— “ Le Premier Consul dit que depuis qu’il entend discuter le code civil, il s’est sou vent aper 9 u, que la trop grande sim- plicite dans la legislation est l’ennemie de la propriete. On ne peut rendre les lois extremement simples sans couper le noeud, plutot que de le delier, et sans livrer beaucoup de choses a l’incertitude de l’arbitraire. Cependant si la jus¬ tice civile est la base de la loi, chacun est frappe du senti¬ ment, que les droits des hommes reposent sur des principes immuables. On perd au contraire le respect pour la pro¬ priete, lorsqu’on la regarde corame soumise a des chances, qui peuvent facilement et sans raison la porter dune main dans une autre. Partout les hypotheques des femmes et des mineurs ont ete considerees comme naissant et s’iden- tifiant avec l’engagement qui les fait naitre. C’est ce principe, qu’il faut parvenir a concilier avec la surete des acquereurs et des preteurs. La loi sera moins simple, mais elle sera conforme aux principes de la justice civile.” f * Reflections on the French Revolution. f Discours, prononces lors de la Discussion du Code Civil. Paris. 1838. Vol. ii. p. 692. TRANSLATION. “ The First Consul said, that since he has been hearing the civil code dis¬ cussed, he has often perceived that too great simplicity in legislation is the enemy of property. Laws cannot be made extremely simple, except by cut¬ ting the knot, instead of untying it, and except by delivering up many things to the uncertainty of what is arbitrary. However, if civil justice is the base of law, every person is struck with the sentiment that the rights of men rest on Immutable principles. Respect for property, on the contrary, is lost, 10 The very evils which the gigantic conception of Napoleon wisely laboured to avoid, were those which the stunted capacity of Bussell, in his vicious legislation, with avi¬ dity embraced. We have the high authority of Lord Plunket, that “ there are no powers too low for the accom¬ plishment of mischief—that there is no capacity so vile or so wretched, as not to be adequate to the perpetration of evil.” A law that would authorise men “ to cut the knot without untying it,” would constitute them the picklocks of property. What a singular verification of the maxim, “ Too great simplicity in legislation is the enemy of pro¬ perty,” have the events of the three last years in Ireland presented to the world ! In reviving the escheat, and substituting the compulsory for the feudal, perchance Bussell contemplated a more de¬ graded state of national vassalage. He probably remem¬ bered the declaration of Grattan, that in order to make us slaves, England should begin by making us beggars. While our pretended patriots were deploring the accumulated evils which crowd into the social vacuum caused by absenteeism, they contrived that ruin should fall heaviest upon the few resident proprietors that remained amongst us. To add mockery to misfortune, owners were empowered to be their own executioners. Blinded by delusion, some simpletons "were even seduced to become suicides. Little did Curran dream, in his prophetic denunciation,* of the realization of a general law, which was to confiscate the widow’s pittance and plunder the orphan’s cradle—a law that, in its vindic¬ tive attainder, violates the sanctity of the grave by the dishonour of the dead—a law, by whose retrospective ope¬ ration, the heads of our most exalted families have been rendered fraudulent debtors—posthumous insolvents in their tombs ! ! when property is looked upon as subjected to chances* which can easily, and without cause, transfer it from one hand to another. Everywhere the mort¬ gages of women and of minors have been considered as arising from and identifying themselves with the engagement which causes them. It is this principle which we must succeed in reconciling with the security of those who acquire and lend. The law will be less simple, but it will be conformable to the principles of civil justice.” * Speech for Pamela. 11 It was the boast of Lord Campbell, now the legal head of the Whigs, before the assembled Peers in the case of O' Connell in Error v. the Queen, “ that this chamber of the Imperial Parliament should long continue satisfac¬ torily to administer justice in the last resort to all the in¬ habitants of the United Kingdom.”* Nevertheless, this iniquitous law outlawed the landed proprietary of Ireland, from the constitutional protection of appeal to the House of Lords, not denied to the negro or the felon. For this spe¬ cial exclusion the Whigs could find a precedent alone in Ireland. They discovered that in administering the atro¬ cities of the penal code, rehearings were refused ; that by the decree on the Discovery Bill, the estate of his neigh¬ bour vested absolutely in the informer, or, in modern parlance , conferred upon him “ a parliamentary title " to property not his own, without paying for it—was the reason then judicially assigned by the Whigs of former days for such denial of justice.f Thus do their descendants now seek to assimilate the modern class of suitors and pur¬ chasers with the plunderers under the Popery laws. We learn from Petty, that in former days “the Irish were divided into the vested and the devested.” Such seems likely again to be the distinctive characteristic of families ! Our equitable jurisprudence contains no more sound nor salutary principle than that a suitor only recovers his costs in the same priority as his demand.J The certainty that if he lose the one, he forfeits the other, was intended to check reckless or speculative litigation in respect of irre¬ coverable claims. Whilst the Whigs, in their affection for free-trade in all its purity, were denouncing the bounty system, and denying its aid to our infant manufactures—to our starving fisheries, they selected a singular exception. They created a bounty for the encouragement of one branch, at least, of Irish industry—that of the attorneys. They specially provided that every party, no matter what the *11 Clarke and Fennelly’s R., p. 421. f Steward v. Magain —Howard’s Popery Laws, p. 120. t 1 Drury and Walsh’s R., p. 236. 12 merits or the motive, rushing before the newly-created Court, should, in every instance, although the fund to bo realised by the sale should never reach one penny of his demand, be rewarded with his costs ! The most modern precedent they could discover for this principle was that of the system of blood-money prosecutions, by which men had been bribed into murder—a system, thank Heaven, at an end, by the execration of all men ! For thus stimulating inquiries into the titles, properties, and circumstances of men, the Whigs found a precedent in the reign of James I., “ when,” we are assured by Leland, that “there were not wanting proofs of the most iniquitous practices to despoil the fair and unoffending proprietor of his inherit¬ ance.”'* His inquisitions into titles, for the benefit of his royal master, the First Charles, subsequently appeared amongst his blackest crimes upon the impeachment of Strafford. Strafford’s ravelling into titles sent him to the scaffold—a fate which has been designated “ a murder by the sword of justice.” He was arraigned by St. John for his declaration, “ that Ireland being a conquered country, he could do with her what he pleased.”! Such seems to have been the notion, as it certainly has been the policy, of the Russell Whigs. Will the sword of justice ever over¬ take them ? The laws to encourage pauperism having succeeded in demoralising the lower, this measure was introduced with the view of effecting similar results upon the better classes. It practically taught, that to overreach, was henceforth to be the essence of contract. It sought to bind all who were involved in the confederacy, in a guilty interest to uphold its injustice. It may be well entitled, “ An Act to Prevent the Growth of Honesty in Ireland !” The law was nefa¬ rious in excluding from its provisions the merciful princi¬ ple of bankruptcy, which, when it wrests from a man all he has—his property—restores him, at least, his liberty. The measure was unconstitutional in its inception ; in its operations, Jacobinical and alarming. It released the * History of Ireland, vol. ii. p. 470. t State Trials, vol. iii. 13 Court it erected from the obligation of principle to govern its procedure, and substituted discretion. “ The discretion of a judge,” observes Gibbon, “is the first engine of ty¬ ranny.” The great Lord Camden judicially declared “ the discretion of a judge to be the law of tyrants. It is casual; it depends upon constitution, temper, passion. In the best, it is often caprice ; in the worst , it is every vice and folly to which human nature is liable.”* The Court, thus un¬ controlled in its decisions, became often merciless in the enforcement of them. They deprived even parties interested of the choice of action. Under their domina¬ tion, suitors became slaves. Tenderness to individuals they deemed to be treachery to their employers. To create, and then to recreate, in the sufferings of men, appeared to be to them a pleasurable, as well as a profitable pastime. Their code was comprised in one sentence, “ Our business is to sell.”f Their motto was adopted from the Satan of Milton, “ Evil is our good.” “ The philosophical poet,” observes Lord Coke, the great oracle of what was once our law, “doth describe the damnable and damned proceedings of the judge of hell: ‘ Castigatque auditque dolos ':—‘ First he punisheth, then he heareth.’ ”J The celebrated French physician, Majendie, declared of the cholera, that it was a disease which began with death. The example of a calamity of nature was followed in the inflic¬ tion of a national one—the creation of a Court, which com¬ menced with execution. Like a calamity it came upon the country, prostrate from debility, unprepared for such a vi¬ sitation. The principle of the measure was execrable ; it inculcated a system of Macheath morality, by teaching cer¬ tain classes to consider their fellow-subjects their proper prey. To meet temporary pressure, it legalises permanent wrong ; with spendthrift prodigality, it sacrifices income ; with reckless precipitancy, it annihilates inheritance. It tends to invest even innocent purchasers with the character * Judgment in Doe. d. Ilendson v. Kersey , a.d. 1764. t Richards, C.C. j Commentary on Magna Charta, 2 Ins., c. 29, p. 55. 14 of those sharpers who infest fraudulent auctions, by ex¬ posing them to the suspicion of being, as it were, the cut- purses and pickpockets of either owners or creditors—gene¬ rally of both. Truly was it predicted by a great lawyer, now, thank Heaven, in the senate, and destined to pre¬ eminence amongst the rising statesmen of Ireland, that the amount of property crowded in this monstrous auction mart “ must be sold at a sacrifice that would make the transfer an act of spoliation, differing very little in moral qualities from that cheap and expeditious mode of conveyancing practised in olden times by very respectable commissioners on Hounslow Heath.”* To wicked cupidity a pander ; of secret conspiracies often the accessory, in some instances the dupe. Affecting simpli¬ city, the Court mystifies details ; to elude inquiry, it parades delusive returns ; to divert public attention, it subsidizes into silence the press. It presents elaborate machinery to grind the land of the country into consols, for more con¬ venient distribution amongst the harpies of pillage. The channels of self-interest, through which it flows, are as nu¬ merous and as varied as the evils it creates and aggravates. Its despotism is only equalled by its nepotism : while in the selection of advocates, it daily presents to the bar the specta¬ cle of family favouritism supplanting professional eminence: it upholds in solicitors, surveyors, valuators, and printers, a system of land piracy unprecedented in extent and in atro¬ city.f In the short period of its existence it has been a whirlpool of ruin; in its vortex, property of every description has been engulphed and swallowed up. Its effects will be tracked hereafter by the mansions it has desolated, by the families it has extirpated: where those mansions once stood, where those families once dwelt in affluence and happiness, we shall henceforth find blanks upon the map of Ireland. Empowered by its formation to entangle half the land of Ireland, it soon forced into “the mean, scandalous,” and un¬ natural market it created, immeasurably more than the * Standard Newspaper, Oct. 1850. f “ Lambro, the pirate, was a sea-solicitor.’ 5 — Byron. 15 languid demand, depressed by panic, could absorb. At first the depression and the glut moved in a circle, mutually producing and produced. At length they gravitated to¬ wards each other by a common affinity, and the combination was reckless, wholesale ruin. Notwithstanding the expen¬ sive quackery of the most profuse advertising, the univer¬ sally circulated announcement, “ Selling off at any sacrifice,” the Court soon became landlocked—a monster gorged by its own voracity. Often have we been reminded by it of the glutton, who, to indulge a depraved appetite, disgust¬ ingly swallows ten times more than he has stomach to di¬ gest. Its interested apologists, as the plethoric malady seems to be abating, will, no doubt, exclaim—“ See how the value of land is rising !—see the progressive increase in the rates of purchase ! !” They hope, by a confident appeal to the present, to throw a veil over the past, and evade the avowal, that the barometer of prosperity is only just now beginning to rise, as the blight of Whiggish misrule vanishes before the more genial influence of those counsels over which your Lordship presides. With such impartial mischief has this measure operated, that it is yet questionable whether debtors or creditors have been the greater sufferers. We learn from the “ Memoirs of Ireland,” by the author of the “ Secret History of Eu¬ rope,” that when James II. coined all the brass and pewter of the kingdom into money, those who had charges on their estates poured in the base coin upon their creditors; “ and they,” observes the writer, “ making some scruple of taking about thirty shillings for £1,000, which was pretty near the difference between the silver and brass coin, King James issued his proclamation, dated 4th of February, 1689, to make that money current in all payments whatsoever, whether judgments, mortgages, &c. Fitton, the Chancellor, compelled the trustees for orphans and widows to receive their mortgages in this kind, as well as others.”* Capti¬ vated with the ingenuity of James, and the equitable adju¬ dications of his highest judicial officer, the Russell Whigs * p. 180. 1G became the patentees of an improved process, by which they obliterated the charges altogether. Instances are innumera¬ ble, where as many pence are not forthcoming as apologies for thousands of pounds. Many aged, many infirm, many wi¬ dows, and many orphans, have to mourn over the loss of all they possessed, swept away in the tyrannic transfers of the soil. When the details of tlieir confiscating inquisition shall be closed and presented to the world, the annihilation of property will be found to equal, probably exceed, that of its only parallel in history—the “gigantic swindle” of the South Sea Scheme ! Coxe tells us, in his “ Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole,” that “thousands of innocent persons were thereby defrauded and impoverished, and that petitions from all parts of the country were presented to Parliament, cry¬ ing for justice due to an injured nation.” In denouncing that frightful destruction of human means and human hap¬ piness, Lord Molesworth, an Irish peer in the British Com¬ mons, declared, that “ the ancient Romans had no law against parricides, because they supposed no son could be so unnaturally wicked.” He, however, proclaimed “ the con¬ trivers and executors of that villainous scheme, as the par¬ ricides of their country.”* Property in land in England is sacred by the tenure of opinion—the phases of its fluctu¬ ations in Ireland have ever been as varied as the counte¬ nances of men. All former vicissitudes sink, however, into insignificance, when contrasted with the sad mutations of fortune daily passing before us. The vast mass of property, now in progress of being melted down, leaving the most helpless, the most interesting classes destitute, because they are creditors, will probably be hereafter seen revived, re¬ suscitated, augmented, and protected, in the hands of the most worthless, because they are purchasers. Melancholy is the reflection, that what has been sown in ruin should be reaped in ease, by the shoals of usurious jobbers and land-sharks, whom the present pernicious system creates, fosters, and encourages. One of its most lamentable con¬ sequences is the prospect, that for them are to fructify those * Parliamentary History, 1720, Yol. vii. p. 683. 17 blessings which we anticipate from the union in the pre¬ sent administration, of political honesty and administrative wisdom. It may, perhaps, be one of the strange and mys¬ terious dispensations of Providence, that spoliation should be rendered an element of regeneration!! In dealing with great public delinquencies, the polar star to guide the political essayist should and shall be the maxim of the eminent Hale, that, when disposed to be merciful to the criminal, his conscience reminded him that there was mercy also due to the country. But we must pass for the present from the further exposure of this revolutionary tribunal to the career of its founder. With that career are inseparably associated the decline and fall of Ireland’s pros¬ perity. Lord John Bussell’s first appearance was in the republic of letters as the writer of a play that was worse than execrable.* Having been immediately and irredeem¬ ably damned in that character, he determined that his name should go down to posterity, at least in Ireland, as the author of more tragic scenes than, irrespective of the horrors of war, any one man in so short a space ever en¬ tailed upon any community. In the London Times of the 18th of January, 1822, appeared a declaration of his politico-economic creed, in his address, dated from Woburn Abbey, the 4th of January preceding, to his constituents— “ The Yeomanry and Farmers of Huntingdonshire !” “ I am inclined to think,” said he, “ that if foreign corn were ad¬ mitted, even if you had scarcely any taxes to pay, it would not be easy for the farmers who required to live in a cer¬ tain degree of respectability and comfort, to compete with the lords of Poland and Kussia, whose vassal peasantry are unacquainted with the wants of a civilised state. Corn is a manufacture (to use our phraseology) cheaply produced in a fertile soil by wretched ploughs, wretched horses, and wretched men. There is a party, however, amongst us distinguished in what is called the science of political economy, who wish to substitute the corn of Poland and Kussia for our own. They count as nothing the value to * Don Carlos: a Tragedy, by Lord John Russell. See Note B. 18 the country of a hardy class of farmers and labourers. They care not for the difference between an agricultural and manufacturing population in all that concerns morals, order, national strength, and national tranquillity ; wealth is the only object in their speculation, nor do they much consider the two or three millions of persons who may be reduced to utter beggary in the course of their ope¬ rations. It is to these men I suspect that our Ministers are about to commit the question of free-trade in corn. Political economy is now the fashion, and the farmers are likely, if they do not keep a good account, to be the vic¬ tims.”* This manifesto ought to be emblazoned on the banners of the Protectionists at the hustings. This is the Minister who learns in the cries of an outraged nation, that the abandonment of the principles above proclaimed has so reduced Ireland, that her fertile soil presents even a melan¬ choly scarcity “ of wretched ploughs , wretched horses , and wretched men /” Principles are immutable. In what have circumstances altered ? Has increased civilisa¬ tion made the Russian or Polish serf a more peculiar object of this lordling’s solicitude ? Did the improved morality of the towns engender in him, when he became the nominee of the Jews and brokers of London, a new-born zeal for the extinction of our rural population ? That he belied those principles—that he betrayed those classes, he cannot deny. In his measures as a Minister he exhibited, in the language of his colleague, Macaulay, “ towards those whom he de¬ serted that peculiar malignity which has been in all ages the characteristic of apostates !”f How impressive was our illustrious Grattan, when, on the 27th of February, 1815, he thus announced to the Imperial Parliament the relations of the two islands towards each other ; it was the last bequest from the father of his country as he was sinking into his grave:—“ The manufacturers,” said he, “ propose to procure the cheapness of corn by going out of the cultivation of it; but they will find that plenty is the only sure cause of cheapness, and that the only certain * Times, January 18, 1822. f History, vol. i, p. 87. 19 plenty is the home market. England clothes Ireland— Ireland feeds England ; both live with one another and by one another. The two nations are bound together by law ; but there is something stronger than law—they are grappled together by the iron fangs of necessity, and not only legally united, but physically identified. This is the very soul of your connexion. In the relationship of these two countries mutual want is mutual concord. That intercourse which makes them physically dependent on one another makes them physically independent of their enemies; and this forms the strength of your empire as well as its abundance. I am for a fixed duty ! because it is an increase of your ways and means ; because it promises plenty where alone it can be relied on—in your home market, and with that plenty, cheapness—that cheapness which is steady, and pays your farmer while it feeds your manufacturer, instead of that extravagant fluctuation which alternately ruins both. I am for it, because it secures us against the policy suggested by its opponents, reducible to three monstrous proposi¬ tions !—an abandonment of tillage, a relinquishment of the power to supply your own consumption, and a dependence on foreigners for bread !”* In this epitome volumes are comprised. The policy thus energetically enforced, by which Ireland rose in consequence and wealth, was the very converse of that lately and slavishly pursued, by which she sunk. Under the shield of national protection, Ireland grew with the growth and strengthened with the strength of her elder and greater sister. If Adam Smith be right, that “ high prices and plenty are prosperity,” Ireland was indeed prosperous. Whether it may be prudent or practicable to re-enact the protective laws is not a question on which the essayist can venture to speculate. The decision must be the concentrated opinion of the empire in the next Parliament assembled. “ There are many measures,” observed Mr. Fox, “that may have been originally bad, yet cannot be remedied by the repeal.”f This is but an amplification of the old maxim, ** Grattan’s Speeches, vol. iv. p. 371. t Parliamentary Debates, February 18. 1806. B 20 “ Quod fieri non debet, factum valet."* These sheets are intended merely to trace the multitudinous evils of which Whig legislation has been the prolific parent—legislation originating in the convulsive efforts of a terrified Ministry, and recklessly enforced, notwithstanding the prophetic ad¬ monitions of the head of the house of Stanley. But we cannot forget how the finality resolves of Russell wither before the sneer of Sydney Smith, “ the man who talks about any law being unalterable is an unalterable fool!” The sentiment expressed in the pathetic couplet of our countryman is generally true— “ How small, of all that human hearts endure. The part that laws or kings can cause or cure.”t Ireland is, however, an exception, for to modern laws can all her ills be demonstratively traced. Lord John Russell is, of all men living, the least likely to calculate results. It is, however, a sound maxim of our jurisprudence, that every man is presumed to intend to bring about the necessary consequences of his own acts. Appetite for office dictated to him his celebrated letter of 22nd of November, 1845, from Edinburgh, to his constitu¬ ents of London. In that letter he sneeringly remarked of Sir Robert Peel, that “ the present First Lord of the Trea¬ sury met my propositions in 1839, ’40, and ’41” (for tam¬ pering with the Corn-laws), “ by eloquent panegyrics of the existing system, the plenty it had caused, the rural happi¬ ness it had diffused.” To diminish that plenty—to destroy that happiness—was, of course, the aim and object of the Russell propositions. That his silly colleague, Earl Carlisle, then Lord Morpeth, should, by a letter from Castle Howard, of the 24th of the same November (an interval of only two days), send his adhesion, and enclose his subscription, to the Corn-Law League, brands the acts of both with pre¬ concerted arrangement. The clamour of that League, fol¬ lowing up the impression produced by those two Whig mis- * What ought not to have been done, when done, ought not to be undone. i Deserted Village. 21 sives, forced upon the terror, or the pliant treachery of Peel— “ Then half a patriot, half a coward grown”— the abrogation of the laws for the protection of native agri¬ culture. How completely were the predictions of Arnold verified, that “ Peel would yield on Church, constitution, colonies—on any question, to clamour.”* Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell had differed for years on many points, but they had agreed on these—that the land was the safe and natural security for capital—that protection was the ancient prerogative of native industry. They had both repeatedly proclaimed that faith with the public creditor was to be inviolate. If the investment of money at any moment in the funds constitutes a public creditor, are not equal claims created by the natural and continuous investment of capital and labour in the purchase or improvement of the soil ? One of the periods referred to by Lord John Russell was a motion, in 1839, to repeal the Corn-Laws. Sir Robert Peel was probably then sincere, when he “ implored Par¬ liament to reflect before they took any step which might tend, directly or indirectly, to the displacement of labour.” “ Little,” said he, “ did they know the suffering and sor¬ row—little could they estimate the wretchedness which sprang from change of habits, of house, of manners, of mode of life itself. Where were the moralists, that their voices were not raised against the fearful consequences which the proposed change brought in its train ? Talk to him of sending the Poles to Siberia ! The authors of the intended change contemplated the perpetration, within the limits of their native land, of a cruelty far more atrocious.”f Sub¬ stitute America for Siberia, and the picture is complete. These predicted atrocities were perpetrated ; and on the 9th of February, 1846, Lord John Russell announced in the House of Commons, “ that his was the solid satisfaction, that in and out of office, he and his friends had associated * Arnold’s Life, vol. ii. p. 57, f Mirror of Parliament. 22 for the purpose of assisting the triumph of the Minister”*— that Minister, Peel—that triumph, “ the fearful conse¬ quences ” which befell the masses of our best population, in the dislocation, the disruption of the varied and wide¬ spread interests which were linked with and twined around the land ! From cotton Sir Robert Peel derived his existence. Birth, interest, early associations, might, perhaps, palliate his craven capitulation to a conspiracy of spinning-jennies. A family connexion with the soil of over three centuries makes the place-grasping apostasy of Russell the more cri¬ minal—the more unnatural! Russell is, therefore, the living author of acts which have more than verified the melancholy predictions of Peel. Under the natural opera¬ tion of such acts, Ireland sunk into languor and collapse. Confiscation was the remedy devised for her relief ! We must now throw a rapid glance over her history, from the period of the preceding confiscation. That con¬ fiscation was consummated in the reign of William of Nassau, after the abject James having thrown himself upon the fidelity of her sons, the energies of Ireland were cloven down at the Boyne. The confiscations of William were hut counter-confiscations to those of James. The identical Whig- spirit which then prompted the victor to trample on the fallen fortunes of a loyal and gallant foe, to crush the rising trade and manufactures of Ireland, will be found to pervade the councils of modern Whiggery for the extinction of her agriculture in the middle of the nineteenth century. “ It is a subject,” said Lord Chancellor Clare, in the Irish House of Lords, on the 10th of February, 1800, “ of curious and important speculation, to look back upon the for¬ feitures incurred in the last “ (the seventeenth)” century. The superficial contents of the island are calculated at 11,042,682 acres. Let us examine the state of the for¬ feitures :—confiscated in the reign of James I., 2,836,837 acres ; set out by the Court of Claims, at the Restoration, 7,800,000 acres ; forfeitures of 1688, 1,060,793 acres ;— * Mirror of Parliament. 23 total, 11,697,629 acres. So that the whole of the island has been confiscated ; and no inconsiderable portion of it has been confiscated twice or thrice in the course of a century. Confiscation is the common title of all the adventurers in Ireland.”* The high position of the speaker—his strong predilections in favour of British connexion, are guarantees that there is no exaggeration in the colouring of the pic¬ ture. The Bussell Whigs probably considered a century and an half too prolonged a period of gestation, to delay further the repetition'of the process ! We are assured by Sir James Mackintosh that “ the confiscations alone which followed the victories of Cromwell, added to the forfeitures under Eliza¬ beth and James, transferred more than two-fifths of the kingdom to British adventurers.’ f We are yet unable, in its unfinished state, accurately to define and divide in deci¬ mal proportions, the most modern partition of Ireland !! Former confiscations were necessarily succeeded by de¬ population. Both led to extensive wastes. As the country recovered from the shock of civil war, these wastes became sheep-walks, and the produce of wool immense. The tem¬ perate mildness of the climate induced the growth, and the sweet and juicy herbage of the soil favoured the fleece, its fineness, and its strength. Notwithstanding the afflictions which a continuous change of masters, during successive centuries, entailed upon her prosperity and her commerce, Lord Charlemont, on the au¬ thority of a Florentine nobleman, who wrote so far back as 1360, states, that the woollen trade early flourished in Ire¬ land, j An Act of the 13th of Elizabeth acknowledges, that her merchants had been exporters of woollens for more than one hundred years before that period. The manufacture had been greatly improved by the introduction of a number of Dutch Protestant artificers, who were driven hither by the persecutions of the Duke of Alva. We are told by Carte, that during the viceroyalty of Ormond, he induced * Debates in the Irish House of Lords, f Revolutions of England, p. 116. t Transactions R.I.A., vol. i. p. 22. 24 five hundred Protestant Walloon families to come from Canterbury to Ireland, to carry on the trade in wool, and that they principally settled at Clonmel and Carrick-on- Suir.* The shuttle and the loom accordingly plied in every town and village a brisk and busy trade. We learn from Dr. Ledwich, “that in 1699, the now deserted and desolate hamlet of Borris-in-Ossory, indeed the whole parish, was filled with wool-combers and weavers.”f So prosperous was the woollen trade, we are assured by Mr. Preston, “ that, in the year 1698, the balance of import and export was £419,442 in favour of Ireland—a large sum,” he adds, “ in those days.”J Too large a sum to escape the evil eye of Whiggery ! When England herself crouched to the Conqueror, the Normans settled on their confiscations. The new blood hav¬ ing been transfused into the veins of the Saxon, identity of interest bound the settler to the soil; their descendants still occupy the baronial domains of their ancestors. The confiscated estates of Ireland, on the other hand, became the spoil of English aristocrats, or of English trading com¬ panies. They themselves remained in the more favoured country, and entailed upon the possessions they had ac¬ quired by pillage, the accumulated evils of absent proprie¬ tors—of resident middlemen—of rapacious irresponsible agents. The importance of such a country, even under such a system, was too vast to escape the sagacity of the statesman. We read in Sir William Temple, the founder of the house and fortune of Palmerston, “ that the native fertility of the soil and seas in so many rich commodities, improved by a multitude of people, with the advantages of so many ex¬ cellent havens, and a situation so commodious for all foreign trade, must needs have rendered this island one of the richest in Europe.” But Temple premised, “ that regard * Carte’s Life of Ormond, f Account of Aghadoe, p. 88. J Prize Essay, K.I.A., on the Capabilities of Ireland, 1796. 25 must be had to those points, wherein the trade of Ireland comes to interfere with the main branches of the trade of England ; in which cases the encouragement of such trade must be either declined or moderated, and so give way to the interest of trade in England.” “ The improvement of this commodity (wool) by manufactures in this kingdom (Ireland), would give so great a damp to the trade of Eng¬ land, that it seems not lit to be encouraged here !”* It is the boast of the Whig families, that the principles of their fathers have descended to them with their blood ! What, in the eyes of Russell and his colleagues, were the hopes, the happiness, the fortunes of the landlords of Ireland, when thrown into the scale against the interests of the Manchester cotton lords ? The woolsack was placed in the House of Lords, in the reign of Edward III., as the emblem of attachment to Protection. The Commons of England, indulging their Whiggish predilections, acting on the precepts of Temple, and jealous of the land, which had then but lately been the battle-field of contending crowns, in 1698, addressed Wil¬ liam of Orange, complaining “ that the wealth and peace of England depended in preserving the woollen manufacture to that realm.” They prayed him, therefore, “ to extinguish the woollen trade of Ireland ! !” William was too constitutional a monarch to forget that he had responsible advisers. In the answer of the Whig ministers of that day, he pledged his royal word in these emphatic terms—“ I shall do all that in me lies to discou¬ rage the woollen manufacture of Ireland.”f The faith of princes has become a by-word ; but injury to Ireland being the object, the fulfilment of this promise furnishes an al¬ most solitary instance of royal veracity. The measure was, of course, unpalatable. Lord Shrews¬ bury, then Lord Lieutenant, in a letter to Lord Somers, of the 15th of October, 1698, observes—“ the Lords Justices of Ireland have written to me, that the success of the ses- * Miscellaneous Works, vol. iii. p. 13. | Journals and Parliamentary History. 26 sion is very hazardous, and the miscarriage will be imputed to this Woollen Bill being crammed down their throats.”* Like more modern Whig measures of the same stamp, “crammed down their throats” it was ! Various prohibitory acts were passed in that and the succeeding reigns, by which the exportation of wool and woollen fabrics was restrained, and afterwards prevented. “ Acts,” which Sir Matthew Decker says, “ proved in the end infinitely serviceable to the woollen manufacture of France.” Could the Russell Whigs have remembered this precedent, when they annihi¬ lated the milling trade of Ireland to favour the importation of French flour ? Recent parliamentary returns would lead us to believe, that they have even improved upon the perverse example of their Williamite predecessors. In shutting up the corn-mills, they , too, crushed a branch of native trade. In closing the markets at his door against the farmer, they completed his ruin, which the low price of wheat, resulting from free imports, had begun. As the finest qualities are alone imported, they aggravated the privations of the poor, by rendering inaccessible to them their natural, wholesome, and cheapest food—the coarser kinds of flour! Thus have the Whigs ever been the deadliest enemies of Ireland’s ad¬ vancement ! ! The destruction of the woollen trade having been ef¬ fected by means “ iniquitously legal,” Mr. Preston thus describes the consequences :—“ The keenest misery over¬ whelmed the land, numbers of its most useful inhabitants were at one stroke deprived of the means of subsistence, and left to perish by famine, or rescue themselves by voluntary exile.”f Have not similar Whig achievements produced precisely similar results before our own eyes ? History enables us to deduce at least one political maxim— that whatever trade or interest was advancing in Ireland, that trade or that interest was doomed to be crushed by legislative interference. It is the boast of the Whigs, that Ireland is fitted, by its position and its climate, only to be a feeding country. Take, therefore, the history of the pro- * Collection of State Papers. t Prize Essay, R.I.A., 1796. 27 vision trade. There were various acts on the statute-book preventing the exportation of cattle. The law first prohi¬ bited the importation into England of living , then of dead cattle. The penalties imposed were prohibitions—“ £5 per beast, and 2s. per stone on salted meat.” Carte tells us, in his “ Life of Ormond ”—“ That cattle became, in consequence, so great a drug in Ireland, that horses which used to be sold for 30s. were now sold for dogs’-meat at 12d. a-piece; and beeves which used to be sold for 50s. were now sold for 10s.” He also explains, “ that the passing of the measure was delayed by some blunders in the clauses put in by the committee, in the heat of their zeal to ruin Ireland .” “ But,” he ob¬ serves, “ all that the Irish got by the delay was to be un¬ done in more congruous terms, and in a more sober manner.”* Notwithstanding that the same prohibitory system was continued by the Whigs in, and subsequent to, the reign of William, such was the fertility of the soil, and the increasing necessities of England, that the trade in cured provisions grew into existence. This trade was itself des¬ tined, when it suited the interests of more modern Whig administrations, to be crushed, under the pretext of free- trade philosophy. In its stead is now substituted an exten¬ sive export of live cattle. The fattening of beasts supplants the rearing of human beings in Ireland ; still those must be simpletons who rely on the punic faith of Whig legislation for the continuance even of that traffic. During the first American, early French, and subsequent Peninsular wars, the provision became the staple trade of Ireland. In addition to being the granary, she was the great store-house to supply meat for the navy, the garrisons, and colonial depots of the empire. A producing country derives inestimable advantages from the export of the ma¬ nufactured article, in preference to that of the raw material. In those days, crowds of hardy men, with well-fed families, earned, in the curing of meat for government contracts, a happy livelihood. The import of salt, the export of cured food, employed our seamen and ships ; the manufacture of * Carte’s Life of Ormond, vol. ii. p. 329. 28 casks our coopers ; and the supply of smaller meat furnished to the operatives of every class an abundance of the now forbidden luxury of animal food. The superiority of the provisions cured in Ireland was so sensibly felt by France during the last war, that the government of Louis Phillippe sent commissioners to this country to inquire into their quality, our treatment, and mode of cure.* They reported, as the results of examina¬ tion, experiments, and analysis, that the meat of Ireland was superior to that of every other country in muscular fibre, and, of course, in its capability of resisting the influence of salt. That it furnished the best cured provisions, they fairly attributed to the climate being the most equable—that is, the least differential between the hottest and coldest ex¬ tremes. The advantages, however, of climate and of skill ceased to be regarded when it suited the convenience of Whig boards and their underlings, and the imaginary inte¬ rests of some favoured colonies, to crush this branch of trade also. We have witnessed Whig imbecility preferring, for the food of our noble and gallant seamen, the poisonous offal of the Jews to the sweet and sound provisions of Ire¬ land. We have seen the contracts for the supply of our navy and our garrisons transferred from the banks of the Liffey and the Lee to those of the Oder and the Elbe. The descendants of those English settlers who had planted themselves on the confiscated estates of Ireland began, at length, to find that legislation had well nigh ren¬ dered their acquirements valueless. It was idle to expect that the step-dame austerity of the elder sister would ever permit the infant and feeble country to become a manufac¬ turing competitor. Our native legislature, such as it was, therefore turned their thoughts to the resources of the soil. The antagonism of rival Parliaments had long depressed the national energies, and the dissensions of hostile creeds di¬ vided the people. Scotch economic jargon had not yet de¬ luded the minds of men, while there was mind in Ireland; * The commissioners were—M. Foullioy, Senior Physician to the Naval Hospital at Brest; and M. Keruman, of the chemical department of the Ecole Polytcchniquc. 29 and, accordingly, the Irish Parliament wisely reared the infant growth of native agriculture by the fostering treat¬ ment of bounties. A recurrence to that system is, of course, impossible. It is, however, demonstrated by appeal to his¬ tory, that the Bounty Act devised by Mr. Foster, in 1780, and ultimately settled in 1784, secured a steady demand for the several species of corn, encouraged their growth, and prevented high prices or scarcity. We have high authority “ that the bounty system produced a certain market for the farmer, increased the average price of his products, and se¬ cured an abundant supply of corn for home consumption. With respect to Ireland, it cannot be for a moment doubted, that the bounty on exporting corn has considerably increased its production, that it has introduced a more re¬ gular supply than was before known, and that it has turned a greater number of hands to agriculture than were before employed in it. The most superficial retrospect of the state of the kingdom for some years, must afford irrefragable proof of the truth of these assertions. Its beneficial influ¬ ence has, from experience, been found considerable and ex¬ tensive.”* This passage is quoted as the language of cotemporary history ; it must, however, be accompanied by a distinct avowal, that a system suited to the state of society and of the country in those days, is wholly inappli¬ cable to their altered circumstances in ours. Mr. Foster, the eminent author of the bounty or pro¬ tective system of that day, must have been justly proud of its results, when, in the Irish House of Commons, on the 7th of February, 1800, he triumphantly asked, “ Can those who now hear me deny, that, since the period of 1782, this country has risen in civilisation and wealth in a greater proportion, and with a more rapid progress, than any country in Europe ?” May we indulge a prayer, that again, under the presiding genius of Conservative wisdom, she may yet rise to her fitting elevation, in the scale of national pros¬ perity. All the sources of her improvement radiated from a com- * Crump’s Prize Essay—On the best means of affording Employment for the People.— E.I.A., 1793. 30 mon centre—that centre her soil. Cultivation crept up the sides of her mountains, her moors sprung into fertility, and golden grain waved in abundance on her plains. Le¬ gislative incorporation with England took place ; the national protective system supplanted the Irish bounty laws ; the empire was involved in foreign war, unprece¬ dented in protraction—in expenditure. Notwithstanding the envious opposition—the malicious impotence of the Whigs—under Conservative administrations our arms were triumphant; our fleets swept every sea ; our armies^pere covered with glory in every clime ; conquest followed in their paths. To whom did our fleets and armies then look for their supplies ? Did they seek their bread from the swarthy Crimean, or their provisions from the greasy bur¬ gomasters of Hamburgh ? No! The green fields of Ire¬ land supplied both ! ! England and Ireland then really united, indeed enjoyed the blessings of what Grattan styled, “ their rich and luxurious connexion.”* To such a height had that prosperity then ascended, that the eloquent Burrowes, a fierce opponent of the Union in Parliament, in his celebrated defence of the Catholic delegates in 1812, declared—“that population has been doubled within thirty years; property has increased more than ten-fold—both are, of course, in almost geometrical progression.After the termination of the War in 1816, Cobbett, then in the United States, thus writes to his friends in England—“ You will be surprised to hear it, but it is, nevertheless, a fact, that pork, and potatoes, and other necessaries of life have actually been imported into America from Ireland, and, as my ambassadors inforiji me, have sold to great advantage. The influx of mouths in the great cities on the coast has . been such, that even the produce of the soil of the country has been unable to supply them with food at so low a price as the food could be supplied from Ireland. These are curious facts.”J Curious facts indeed, when contrasted with the effects of free-trade legislation. * Faction unmasked. f State trials. j Political Register for August, 1816. 31 Even at a later period, an high authority in 1823 ob¬ serves':—“ The cultivation 1 ^' wheat has rapidly increased , in Ireland during a series of years. The wheat crop, be the price what it may, is the only means of paying rent. The population do not consume wheat; they produce it. We did not deplore the population, nor mourn over the potato, they were not discovered jo he calamities until lately. Why ? Because, unty.; vqry lately, the population haAtfuli employment.”* These observations were penned before"the Whigs had superseded employment by the poor- laws—before the free import of foreign wheat had driven our own out of cultivation. Although coarse, how conclusive is the reasoning of Cobbett, an high authority on political common sense. He thus addressed the operatives of England clamouring for cheap bread—“ Have your bellies got so much the better of your brains, as to cause you to believe, that men will grow wheat here , if you live upon foreign wheat, and that the culture of wheat at home will not diminish in the exact proportion to the quantity of wheat imported.” “That high prices do not make paupers is clear, from the incontro¬ vertible fact, that wages keep pace in price with food, and that high price of corn tends to cause employment which, under low prices, would not and could not exist.”f In these few observations are compressed a perfect answer, by anticipation, of the mischievous fallacies and perverse follies of free trade. The extensive growth of the potato, whilst it favoured the provision trade, naturally led to the expansion of the population. Th§ poor-laws were devised by Lord John Bussell to check immigration into England, in search of that employment denied at home, which had been thither transferred. “ A poor-law,” observed Sir Thomas Brown, “ is the barometer which marks, in all the apparent sun¬ shine of prosperity, the progress of national weakness and debility.” The system literally “ crammed down our * O’Driscoll’s Views of Ireland, vol. i., p. 414. f Political Register, 1814. 32 throats” by Russell, was opposed by the country, unsuited to the people. Crude in its conception, in its contrivances preposterous, in its expense oppressive, in its effects demo¬ ralizing, in its consequences calamitous. It levelled all classes. In their legislation, the Whigs forgot the distinction between the pauper and the poor. While they reproached the laziness of the population, they prohibited the pauper from producing, either to feed himself, or to relieve those on whom they cast him as a burden. They designated their bastiles work-houses, from no work being done within them. By commingling the inmates, without distinction of age or class, they debased all. Whilst they declaimed upon the blessings of education, they trained the pauper children in idleness and sloth ; sleeping in the sun, their schooling ; devouring the hard-earned substance of the rate¬ payers, their only employment. To exemplify, occasionally, the evils of a fatal facility of procuring food, thrift became at times so fashionable, that many of the children were allowed to die of starvation. A great Whig authority, Mr. Nassau Senior, ventures an assertion, “ that infanticide has been found favourable to population.”* Perhaps the Whigs, in their zeal for our improvement, wished to verify the paradox respecting the Chinese, by starving the Irish. “ The objection I have,” observed the eminent Dr. Chalmers, “ against a compulsory system of poor-rate assessment, is not to save the pockets of the wealthy, but to save the cha¬ racters and principles of the poor.” In creating a right to out-door relief, the Whigs lured the majority of our rural population into pauperism. The contagion communicated by contact, extinguished in the masses even the traces of morality and decency. The famine but anticipated, although it may have acce¬ lerated, the free-trade ruin ; but away with the term “free- trade.” Trade implies reciprocity, and what trade have the Whigs left to Ireland ? Our exports they have annihilated, and in return they have given us the benefit of free * Article on Political Economy. Encyclopedia Metropolitana. Reprinted in Octavo, p. 34, 33 imports ! How prophetic was Lord Brougham, when, in May, 1820, he predicted, “that if the corn laws were re¬ pealed, the tenants would be expatriated, and the landlords in the work-house !” He lived to support their repeal, and to witness the consequences he foretold. There might have been some compensating balance in the social relations of England, which, by regulating the equilibrium between machinery and man, would, in time, adjust the effects of their repeal there . But there is none such in Ireland. Bishop Berkeley asks, in quere 325, “ Whether there may not be found a people, who so contrive as to be impoverished by their trade ?” If he were alive he might answer this startling paradox in the affirmative— The People of Ireland ! They export their population ; they import their food and their fuel ! Truly has Alison, the historian of modern Europe, observed, “ That in the decrease of rural inhabitants and productions, the premonitory symptoms of national decline and fall are ever found!” When the confiscations in the reign of William III., had recruited, with the victims, the ranks of the enemies of England, a distinguished senator declared in the British Parliament, that two Irish regiments, at Cre¬ mona, in 1702, had done more injury to the high allies, than the fee-simple of all their forfeited estates was worth.* In those times, when the continued severities of the penal code drove the descendants of the despoiled and exiled fami¬ lies into the armies of France, George II., on hearing of their chivalrous valour on the field of Fontenoy, exclaimed, “ Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects I” Cursed and doubly cursed be those laws which, in our times, outlaw the families of gentle blood, and of every creed, from the homes of their fathers, and excommunicate the peasantry, “ once their country’s pride,” from the land of their birth, from the altars of their ancient faith. Laws which pervert the Irish subjects of the British Crown into citizens of the American States, and invigorate, with the blood, and bone, Wilson’s Historical Facts relative to Ireland, p. cxxx. 34 and sinew of the old world, the energies of those whom des¬ tiny has stamped as the implacable enemies of our empire in the new ! The example is before us. The descendants of the Pro¬ testant weavers of the North, whom the extinction of the woollen trade had converted into outcasts, were afterwards recognised in arms within the lines of Pensylvania, aveng¬ ing the wrongs of their own in the liberation of their adopted country. Neither were they absent nor idle on the fatal field of Saratoga, where the star of England sunk in crimson shame. Pardon me, my Lord, the intrusion upon your high and varied avocations of these heart-sickening reminiscences. A conscious acquaintance with their sad realities, a proud ambition of retrieving, as far as possible, their appalling effects, have impelled you to the chivalrous acceptance of office. In flinging down the gage of battle to the Whigs, and unfurling, on your banner, an appeal to “ God and your country,” you proclaimed anew the confident defiance of ancient nobility, “ that Heaven would give the victory to him who had the right !” The return of cultivated life, with the restoration of a polished court to the capital, the unanticipated display of arts, industry and elegance, in the Exhibition at Cork—a miniature of the wonders of your great metropolis—already in the brief period of its existence, attest the vivifying ef¬ fects of your administration. Under its auspices, increased vigour, with electrical rapidity, circulates through every class. The langour of distrust vanishes, as confidence re¬ vives. The very seasons present themselves as harbingers of future hope, and our industrial anticipations spring to¬ wards improvement, progressively with the joyous and abundant manifestations of the earth. Through you, my Lord, I, too, venture to approach the country. I address those farmers who still possess that franchise which is to summon them to the hustings. I in¬ voke them by the wrongs they have endured—by the deso¬ lations they have witnessed—by the banished friends from whom they have been severed—by their aspirations to behold 35 the resurrection of their country. Let it be their pride to tell their children hereafter—we voted in the great elec¬ toral struggle that rescued Ireland from the Whigs. I pray the clergy of every creed to remember, that, in becoming Christian ministers, they have not ceased to be Irishmen. I implore them to meet in the spirit of union, and sacrifice, at least for a time, their sectarian divisions on the altar of their common country. To the proprietors of the soil, whom extermination has yet spared, I adopt the language of the brilliant Bushe, “ Where is that spirit which, in the year 1782, swelled the crest and glorified the character of the Irish gentry, which achieved liberty for themselves, extorted justice for Ireland, and admiration from Europe ? Is it fled and extinguished for ever ? I will not believe it!” I have the honour to be, my Lord, Your faithful and obedient servant, HORACE HOPE. To the Right Honorable, the Earl of Derby, &c., &c. Dublin, June 18th, 1852. NOTES. -♦- A.—p. 5. A flimsy attempt to rescue the memory of Sir John Russell, after¬ wards created the first Lord John Russell, and subsequently the first Earl of Bedford, from the crushing denunciations of Burke, possibly prepared, or, at the least, the materials furnished by, the present Lord John himself, will be found in the fifty-ninth volume of the Edinburgh Review , from page 314 to 320. The apologist thus affects to contra¬ dict Burke—“ The Earl of Bedford, it is true, was enriched by grants of abbey-lands which the Crown had acquired by forced surrenders or direct confiscation.” But he adds, “ The grants of Henry VIII. dif¬ fered in no respect from those of his predecessors, except in their magnitude !” B.—p. 15. In Cobbett's Political Register of the 4th of January, 1823, will be found a criticism very characteristic of its author, on “ Don Carlos : a Tragedy, by Lord John Russell” :—“ There never was a piece of writ¬ ing,” he observes, “ that gave evidence of a more complete want of talent in the author. There is no plot. All is jejune from the first line to the last. There is nothing that you can call an incident; no¬ thing to break in upon or give you relief from the dull, stupid, concep¬ tion, the whole of which you see through before you have read half- a- dozen pages. The language low and spiritless. Where the writer aims at passion, we mean impassioned language, it appears to us as the bluster of Gulliver appeared to the Brobdignagians. It is impos¬ sible to read the passages to which we allude, without thinking of Swift’s description of the squeaking of the little presumptuous creature, strutting about the table of his master. Of Lord John’s rhetorical flourishes, we have a specimen in the words of the king, when he tells Leonora “ to stay her tongue upon the threshold of her speech.” Again, Valdez goes on to say “that he triumphed over his passion/ “ I triumphed, yes ! I triumphed, but the fire burnt inwards, till My soul grew hard with suffering.’* That is to say, his body became a sort of brick-kiln, and his soul was the brick. The piece is full of out-of-the-way conceits like this, which is one of the strongest marks of poverty of intellect. It has doubtless been offered to the stage. We are very sure that three scenes would not be suffered to pass without bringing down a shower of apples and oranges sufficient to endanger the eyes and noses of the actors. No manager dare to insult an audience with such a performance, and we are satisfied that no one but a Lord would have ventured to insult the public with it in the shape of a pamphlet.”—p. 42.