IRELAND.
The distracted state of Ireland was, as usual, a source of uneasiness to the empire. There was, indeed, no insurrectionary movement, but the spirit of agrarian outrage continued, and numerous murders were perpetrated of a most savage nature—the country people conniving at the crimes, and secreting the criminals. These evils were, to a great extent, provoked by the unjust state of the law between landlord and tenant. Efforts were made in parliament to mitigate the injustice and oppression to which the tenantry in Ireland were subjected; but the landed interest in England upheld that in Ireland in resisting all melioration.
Religious intolerance continued to agitate every other malady of Ireland. Indeed this was the fons et origo mali, for it deprived honest men and patriots of opportunity to combine for their country’s freedom and prosperity. During the elections caused by Lord Derby’s dissolution of parliament, the priests incited the populace, in some places, to acts of disturbance and violence. At Six Miles Bridge the soldiery were attacked while protecting voters in the free exercise of their franchise. Proceedings were taken against a Roman Catholic priest for the part which it was alleged he took in those disturbances. Public opinion considered him to have been the cause of the outbreak, but the tory government, anxious for party purposes to conciliate the Roman Catholics, did not dare to prosecute him.
The Young Ireland agitation was not extinguished, and it received some new inspiration of hope from the escape of Thomas Meagher, from Australia. That adventurous young man made his way from his penal abode at the antipodes to America, where he became a citizen. He was a true patriot, and an ardent friend of liberty; he had no sympathy with the pro-slavery and red republican opinions of his former coadjutor, Mitchell, nor with the raving and malignant bigotry of Charles Gavan Duffy. In the United States he was an object of universal respect, his amiability and eloquence winning, in private and public, “golden opinions from all sorts of men.”
Ireland showed various symptoms of returning prosperity. The only agitation in which the higher classes took part was in opposition to the unjust scheme of Disraeli, to tax the Irish fundholder for the advantage of the English and Irish landholder. This measure was denounced by the capitalists of Ireland as a violation of faith to the public creditor, and sapping tire foundations upon which the security and sacredness of property rested.
The ribbon conspiracy was active during the year, and no suitable effort was made by Lord Derby’s government to uproot it.