With what reason the Irish administration were charged with having clandestinely excited, or culpably connived at the excesses of these men, the people of England may determine when they hear that the magistracy of that country remained for many months inactive spectators of these scenes; nay, indeed, in some cases, are said to have given countenance and support to the offenders, by executing the laws with the most inflexible rigour against the Catholics when they happened to fall into any casual error in repelling the attacks of their persecutors, while these latter were left in the enjoyment of perfect impunity.
But this is not the only circumstance which may assist an Englishman to judge how far the Irish administration participated in the guilt of these disturbances—there is another which seems pretty decisive on this point; and that is, that notwithstanding this palpable and notorious misconduct of the Armagh magistracy, not one man was turned out of the commission for his negligence and connivance on those occasions! What apology did the Irish Chancellor offer for not removing those magistrates?—"That better men could not be found in the country!"
This feud, so malignant in its origin, and so destructive in its progress, was possibly expected to have weakened the efficacy of the popular sentiment against the Irish Ministers, by throwing the different religious descriptions to a consideration of their respective and peculiar interests. It produced a very contrary effect. The persecution commenced against the Catholics in Armagh, alarmed the Catholics in every quarter of the country; and when they saw such enormities committed against them with impunity, if not with the approbation of the Castle, they naturally apprehended that a general persecution was designed. They knew, however, that the great body of the Protestants in Ireland were too enlightened to assist in such a scheme—for they had already experienced that the rigour of old prejudices was abated, and that men now began to consider each other rather as men than as religionists.—But they also knew the character of the administration; and the recent transactions in Armagh and elsewhere, taught them, that though they had no reason to fear persecution from the great body of their Protestant fellow-subjects, they were yet not exempt from danger. These fears suggested the necessity of drawing still more closely the bond of union between them and their countrymen of other persuasions. The Protestants met them half way in their advances toward a conjunction of interests—for they perceived, that though the present blow was struck against the Catholics, yet the warfare of administration was not against them only, but against the constitution, against the people, their privileges, and their interests.
Had these been the only consequences that followed this dreadful experiment, the partial evil would have been compensated by the union which it produced. But this was not the case. The alarm which the Armagh persecution produced on the minds of the enlightened Catholics, and on the lower orders of that description were very different. In the former it produced a desire to unite more closely with his Protestant brethren, in order to form by their conjunction the stronger barrier against the apprehended assault of the Irish Cabinet upon both. In the latter, it excited a fear of extermination, which resolved itself into the most violent and unjustifiable measures, of what they considered personal defence—The Orange-men had deprived the Catholics of their arms—the lower order of Catholics co-operating in many instances with their Protestant neighbours of the same rank, who detested the conduct of Orange-men, betook themselves to retaliate on those whom they considered suspected characters. The robbery of arms became a general measure of safety, and those who exerted themselves in this way obtained the name of Defenders—a body of men, whom that administration which suffered the Orange-men to violate the laws with impunity, followed with the utmost severity of legal punishment.
No man who values the interests of society, or knows the value of peace and good order in a community, can be supposed for a moment to justify the intemperate and incautious conduct of those deluded men. If such licence as they usurped were permitted, human society must be dissolved, and man be thrown back to a state of savage nature. But on the other hand, no man who has any regard for truth, or who enjoys a capacity of distinguishing between different ideas, can deny, that the crimes of the Defenders were provoked by the preceding crimes of the Orange-men, and that those powers which, contrary to justice, were suffered to lie dormant against the one class, whose guilt was original and unprovoked, were exercised without mercy against the latter; whose errors were the ebullition of untaught nature repelling in an untaught way, the most wanton and unparalleled aggression.
There were some collateral circumstances which contributed to give full effect to the impression which the enormities of the Orange society were calculated to make on the minds of the lower orders. The severity with which administration had followed the United Irishmen by dispersing their meetings, seizing their papers, and prosecuting as libels every publication which emanated from them, had driven them to the necessity of meeting secretly, and admitting members into their society in a private and mysterious manner. Between secret meetings and conspiracy the interval is small—between meeting secretly for constitutional purposes and meeting to alter or overthrow the constitution, the interval is perhaps still less. Whether the objects or the United Irish societies were at this period unconstitutional or not, it is certain the meetings were clandestine, and that of the lower class of people numbers flocked to them who were admitted only on condition of taking an oath to be true to the body—i. e. to keep its secrets, and to devote themselves to the pursuit of the two great popular objects—Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. The impression which the minds of the lower order of the people would be apt to receive at the discussion of these meetings cannot be considered as very likely to mitigate their zeal in opposition to the persecutors of the Catholics, or to form their minds to receive with patient forbearance the severities which were now every where exercised indiscriminately against the United Irishmen and Defenders—terms which, in the indiscriminating language of the senate and the Castle, were considered as synonymous.
In considering the effect which the extensive and secret meetings of the United Irishmen produced on the dispositions of the lower people it is not necessary to ascertain whether the designs of that body were or were not treasonable. It is sufficient that were they precisely limited to their professed objects, emancipation and reform, the effect of them on the mass of the public by whom they were constituted must be adverse to the system which administration had adopted, and which they now began to force on the nation by means the most unjustifiable.
If this statement of facts, which I have now submitted to the English nation, as demonstrative that the Irish administration were themselves the authors of those enormities which they have since made a pretext for introducing fire and sword through the country—if this statement, I say, be true, and I defy any part of it to be disproved, their guilt and the emptiness of the pretences by which they have endeavoured to screen it, are incontrovertible:
What was the next measure of administration? The Insurrection Act. The outrages which commenced in Armagh, and had been but too successfully, though faintly, imitated in several parts of the country, administration now affected to consider as incurable by any of the ordinary powers with which the law invested the executive authority. A law was therefore propounded and adopted, by which any district which the magistrates of it might think proper to declare in a state of disturbance, or in immediate danger of becoming so, (phrases so vague that it required but little artifice to make them applicable at that time to any county in the kingdom,) was put into such a state of regimen, that any individual magistrate might on his own authority, without trial or proof, seize the person of any inhabitant and send him to serve on board his Majesty's fleet—i. e. transport him for life.
In such districts the privileges of the constitution with respect to liberty, and I may add, life, were completely suspended; for whether under pretended authority derived from this act, or from the superabundant zeal of the military protectors of the public peace, who were employed to assist in the execution of it, numbers fell, either by being shot at their own doors, or by the newly-invented process of strangulation, adopted to procure confession of crimes which perhaps had never been committed, or the accusation of others, whose innocence might have made it impossible to convict them by other evidence.