STATE OF AFFAIRS IN IRELAND.
The Catholic relief bill was impotent to stem the tide of agitation in Ireland. That country, indeed, in the very year that it passed, presented the same scenes of violence and outrage as before. While the registation rendered necessary by the act which disfranchised the forty-shilling freeholders was going on, Mr. O’Connell was taking measures to secure his re-election for the county of Clare. In a letter to the electors he again raised the standard of defiance to government. It represented himself and his constituents, in fact, as the conquerors of the government; and spoke of it as faithless and insulting. In it he remarked: “The house of commons have deprived me of the right conferred on me by the people of Clare. They have, in my opinion, unjustly and illegally deprived me of that right; but from their decision there is no appeal, save to the people. I appeal to you. In my person the county of Clare has been insulted. The brand of degradation has been raised to mark me, because the people of Clare fairly selected me. Will the people of Clare endure this insult, now that they can firmly but constitutionally efface it for ever? Electors of the county of Clare, to you is due the glory of converting Peel and conquering Wellington! The last election for Clare is admitted to have been the immediate irresistible cause of producing the Catholic relief bill. You have achieved the religious liberty of Ireland. Another such victory in Clare, and we shall attain the political freedom of our beloved country.” The victory which had been achieved, he said, was still necessary to be maintained in order to “prevent Catholic rights and liberties from being sapped and undermined by the insidious policy of those men who, false to their own party, can never be true to us, and who have yielded, not to reason, but to necessity, in granting us freedom of conscience.” Even the Catholic relief bill itself did not escape the censure of Mr. O’Connell. The prohibition contained in it against the growth of the monastic orders especially was denounced by him. He remarked:—“I trust I shall be the instrument of erasing from the statute-book that paltry imitation of the worst and still existing portion of Jacobinism, a miserable imitation, which pretends to do that which nature and religion forbid to be done—to extinguish monastic orders in Ireland. While it is law, its penalties will be submitted to; but let me add as a matter of fact, that its mandate will most assuredly not be obeyed. It was formerly death in Ireland to be a friar; and the Irish earth is still scarcely dry from the blow of martyred friars: the friars multiplied in the face of death. Oh for the sagacity of Peel, and the awful wisdom of Wellington, that meditate to suppress monastic orders in Ireland by a pecuniary penalty, and the dread of a foreign mission, under the name of banishment!” In this letter Mr. O’Connell made some magnificent promises to the electors of Clare and the people of Ireland at large. He would obtain the repeal of the disfranchisement act, of the sub-letting act, and of the vestry bill; would assail the system of “grand jury jobbing, and grand jury assessment;” would procure an equitable distribution of church property between the poor on the one hand, and the laborious portion of the Protestant clergy on the other; would cleanse the Augean stables of the law, for which Herculean task his professional habits gave him peculiar facilities; would procure for every Catholic rector of a parish, a parochial house, and an adequate glebe; would make manifest the monstrous injustice that had been done to the Jesuits and the monastic orders; would wage war against the East India charter; would strain every nerve in the cause of parliamentary reform; and would provide a system of poor laws for Ireland that would be agreeable even to those who had to pay their money for the support of the poor. He added:—“If the gentry of Clare are desirous to have as their representative a man who is able and most desirous to protect in parliament their properties and permanent interests, let them do me the honour to elect me. But let them not lay the flattering unction to their souls, that they can, without an independent man of business as their representative, postpone the introduction of the English system of poor laws.” As soon as Mr. O’Connell took the field an “aggregate meeting” of Catholics, which was nothing else than a meeting of the Catholic Association took place, to consider what steps should be adopted to forward his re-election. The first thing done was to vote £5000 of the rent as an aid to assist the agitator in standing for the county of Clare, The election did not excite much interest, as Mr. O’Connell was not opposed; but it was preceded and accompanied by “triumphant entries” as they were called; that is, assemblages of large crowds of people, to whom were addressed harangues in which inflammatory abuse was mixed up with low buffoonery. On the subject of the repeal of the union with England, he said at Youghall:—“We have now a brighter era opened to us; and I trust that all classes of my countrymen will join together, and, by forming one general firm phalanx, achieve what is still wanting to make Ireland what it ought to be. Ireland had her 1782, she shall have another 1782. Let no man tell me it is useless to look for a repeal of the odious union, that blot upon our national character. I revere the union between England and Scotland; but the union which converted Ireland into a province, which deprived Ireland of her parliament, it is for the repeal of that measure we must now use all the constitutional means in our power: that union which engenders absenteeism, and the thousand other evils which naturally flow in its train. We are bound to England by the golden link of the crown; and far be it from me to weaken that connexion by my present observations: I want no disseveration; but I want and must have a repeal of that cursed measure which deprived Ireland of her senate, and thereby made her a dependent upon British aristocracy and British interests. I may perhaps be told that to attempt a repeal of the union would be chimerical. I pity the man who requires an argument in support of the position that Ireland wants her parliament; and that individual who pronounces the attainment of such a consummation to be Utopian, is reminded of the Catholic question. Look at the Catholic cause. Do I not remember when it was difficult to procure a meeting of five Catholics to look for a restoration of our then withheld rights? I recollect when we agitators were almost as much execrated by our fellow-slaves, as we were by our oppressors. For the attainment of the repeal of the union, I shall have the co-operation of all classes and grades in society: the Orangemen of the north, the Methodist of the south, and the quiet unpresuming Quaker, who may think his gains shall be thereby augmented, all shall be joined in one common cause, the restoration of Ireland’s parliament.” But this was a mild attack upon England compared with other portions of the agitator’s speeches. It is no wonder then that Ireland soon presented scenes of as much violence as those from which the emancipation bill was to relieve her for ever. The hostile feelings of parties continued, and manifested themselves in the same way as heretofore. Catholics and Protestants alike had recourse to organization, and the slightest accident, the most casual collisions produced contention, and generally ended in bloodshed. Thus on the 12th of July, which the Protestants had resolved to celebrate, the Catholics determined to oppose their intention by force wherever they could, and in the counties of Clare, Tipperary, Armagh, Leitrim, Cavan, Fermanagh, and Monaghan, the aspect of open war was assumed, and it was only prevented by the presence of the military. Many lives were, indeed, sacrificed, and many thousands were driven from their homes by the opposing parties. In several instances where death had occurred from the interference of the police, or from their resistance when attacked, trials ensued; but this only tended to exasperate the Catholics still more. An acquittal, though proceeding on the clearest evidence that life had been justly taken from an armed aggressor, was uniformly ascribed to partiality. Imagining that the law existed only to be used against them they took the task of retribution for supposed injuries into their own hands, and assumed arms to gratify revenge, in defiance of the law Judges, juries, and the government were laughed at by Catholic criminals, for no witness dared to communicate what he knew against them. At the close of this year, indeed, matters had proceeded to such a length in Ireland, and especially in Tipperary, that the magistrates expressed an opinion that nothing but a revival of the insurrection act would secure the peace of the country. But this could not be effected, for it had expired, and parliament was not sitting. So Ireland was left to be rent asunder with the spirit of faction. “State gipsies” were left to pick the pockets of the ignorant as they pleased, or as they could gain control over those of the people, by their artful and seditious harangues.