CONTINUED POLITICAL AGITATION.—DREADFUL PREVALENCE OF CRIME.
Unfortunately, the progress of crime and outrage kept pace with that of famine and pestilence, until the moral condition of the people seemed to be worse than their physical. Men were murdered in the open day, in the presence of numbers who made no effort to stop the deed of blood, and who would make no revelations to the officers of justice calculated to bring punishment upon the coldblooded assassins. The motives for these sanguinary outrages were various: sometimes it was purely agrarian; sometimes for the purpose of plundering food or money. Some were murdered from purely political hostility, and others on account of their prominence in religious movements distasteful to the people. Intolerance, contempt for law, a sense of wrong under the influence of the laws of landlord and tenant then in existence, and despair caused by their sufferings, constituted the incentives to atrocities which threw a hue of blood and gloom over the pages of Irish history.
The political differences which had long rent the country were exasperated, although men of all sects and parties united with equal zeal for the relief of the poor. No charities seemed to soften the heart of the Irish peasant towards those who entered strongly into political or religious combinations to which he was averse.
The new political disputes gathered strength; the different sections of repealers waged not only a wordy war with one another, as in the previous year, but the “Old Irelanders” frequently committed outrages upon the “Young Irelanders,” characterised by insolent intolerance and ferocity.
Foreign nations saw, with admiration, the magnitude of the scale upon which government extended relief. By an act of parliament a loan of eight millions sterling was contracted by government for the purpose of mitigating the wants of Ireland. On the first of March it was adjudicated; Messrs. Barings and Rothschilds having coalesced, they were declared the contractors. The loan was in 8 per cent. Consols; the bidding was 89-1/2. The total amount of stock created by the transaction was £8,938,548. The annual charge for the dividend was £268,156 8s. 10d. The scrip, which opened at 2 premium, rapidly fell to discount, and gradually declined, showing the feeling of the monied interest regarding the monetary prospects of the period as affected by Ireland. The commercial distress in Ireland, partly consequent upon the famine and partly upon the general causes then operating in England, was extensive and profound. Heavy failures, in connection with houses of much reputation, shook the general credit, and aggravated the other existing influences by which suffering was originated or increased.
A new form of lawlessness appeared along the Irish coasts. Piracy had not been known there for a great length of time: the coast-guards and revenue cutters prevented that crime, as well as smuggling; but, early in the spring, formidable piratical attempts were made along an extended line of coast. Generally such attempts were frustrated when any weapons of offence were possessed by the attacked; for these enterprises, although furtive and made by considerable numbers, were seldom conducted or maintained with spirit. Thus, in April, the Christian, while on her passage from Liverpool to Westport, with a cargo of Indian corn, was suddenly boarded, seven or eight miles off Broadhaven, by three boats’ crews, who broke up the hatches, and carried away thirty-three bags of corn. On the following day they again approached, but the circumstance of the master presenting a gun was sufficient to deter them from any attempt to board. The men effecting these robberies seem to have been actuated by distress; they seldom committed violence, and bore all the aspect of famine and despair.