But it was impossible to convert the great Mr Bristles to the belief into which his quondam follower, Mr Pitskiver, had fallen as to the qualities of Miss Hendy. That literary gentleman had too just a perception of the virtues of the modern Corinne, and of a comfortable house at Hammersmith, with an income of seven hundred a-year, to allow them to waste their sweetness on some indecent clown, unqualified by genius and education to appreciate them. The result of this resolution was seen in a very few days after the interesting scene in Harley Street; and the following announcement in the newspapers will put our readers in as full a state of knowledge as we can boast of being in ourselves:—
"Woman's value Vindicated as the teacher and example of Man, by Mrs Bristles, late Miss Hendy, Hammersmith."
IRELAND.
An interdict has rested, through four months, on the discussion of Irish affairs—an interdict self-imposed by the English press, in a spirit of honourable (almost of superstitious) jealousy on behalf of public justice; jealousy for the law, that it should not be biased by irresponsible statements—jealousy for the accused, that they should not be prejudiced by extra-judicial charges. At length the interdict is raised, and we are all free once more to discuss the great interests so long sealed up and sequestered by the tribunals of Dublin. Could it have been foreseen or fancied, pending this sequestration, that before it should be removed by the delivery of the verdict, nay, two months before the trial should have closed in a technical sense, by the delivery of the sentence, the original interest (profound as it was) would be obliterated, effaced, practically superseded, by a new phasis of the same unparalleled movement? Yet this has happened. A debate, which (like a series of natural echoes) has awakened and revived all the political transactions of last year in Ireland, should naturally have preserved the same relation to those transactions that any other shadow or reflection bears to the substance. And so it would: but unhappily with these rehearsals of the past, have mingled tumultuous menaces of a new plot. And these menaces, in the very act of uttering themselves, advertise for accomplices, and openly organize themselves as the principle of a new faction for refusing tranquillity once more to Ireland. Once more an opportunity is to be stifled for obtaining rest to that afflicted land.
This "monster" debate, therefore, presents us in equal proportions with grounds of disgust and terror—a disgust which forces us often to forget the new form of terror—a terror (from a new conspiracy) which forces us to forget even the late conspiracy of Repeal, and that glorious catastrophe which has trampled it under foot for ever.
It is painful to the understanding—this iteration of statements a thousand times refuted; it is painful to the heart—this eternal neglect (in exchange for a hear, hear) of what the speaker knows to be mere necessities of a poor distracted land: this folly privileged by courtesy, this treason privileged by the place. If indeed of every idle word—meaning not trivial word, but word consciously false—men shall hereafter give account, Heavens! what an arrear, in the single case of Ireland, will by this time have gathered against the House of Commons! Perfectly appalled we are when we look into the formless chaos of that nine nights' debate! Beginning with a motion which he who made it did not wish[1] to succeed—ending with a vote by which one-half of the parties to that vote meant the flattest contradiction of all that was contemplated by the rest. On this quarter, a section raging in the highest against the Protestant church—on that quarter, a section (in terror of their constituents) vowing aid to this church, and yet allying themselves with men pledged to her destruction. Here, men rampant against the Minister as having strained the laws, in what regarded Ireland, for the sake of a vigour altogether unnecessary; there, men threatening impeachment—as for a lenity in the same case altogether intolerable! To the right, "how durst you diminish the army in Ireland, leaving that country, up to March 1843, with a force lower by 2400 rank and file shall the lowest that the Whigs had maintained?" To the left, "how durst you govern Ireland by martial strength?" Question from the Minister—"Will you of the Opposition place popish bishops in the House of Lords?" Answer from a premature sponsor of Lord John's—"We will." Answer from Lord John—"I will not." Question retrospective from the Conservatives—"What is it, not being already done, that we could have done for Ireland?" Answer from the Liberals—"Oh, a thousand things!" Question prospective from the Conservatives—"What is it, then, in particular, that you, in our places, would do for Ireland? Name it." Answer from the Liberals—"Oh, nothing in particular!" Sir R. Peel ought to have done for Ireland whole worlds of new things. But the Liberals, with the very same power to do heretofore, and to propose now, neither did then, nor can propose at present. And why? partly because the privilege of acting for Ireland, so fruitful in reproaches, is barren in practice: the one thing that remained to be done,—viz. the putting down agitators—has been done; and partly because the privilege of proposing for Ireland is dangerous: first, as pledging themselves hereafter; second, because to specify, though it were in so trivial a matter as the making pounds into guineas for Maynooth, is but to put on record, and to publish their own party incapacity to agree upon any one of the merest trifles imaginable. Anarchy of anarchies, very mob of very mobs, whose internal strife is greater than your common enmity ab extra—what shall we believe? Which is your true doctrine? Where do you fasten your real charge? Amongst conflicting arguments, which is it that you adopt? Amongst self-destroying purposes, for which is it that you make your election?
It might seem almost unnecessary to answer those who thus answer themselves, or to expose the ruinous architecture of politicians, who thus with mutual hands tear down their own walls as they advance, were it not for the other aspect of the debate. But the times are agitated; the crisis of Ireland is upon us; now, or not at all, there is an opening for a new dawn to arise upon the distracted land; and when a public necessity calls for a contradiction of the enemy, it is a providential bounty that we are able to plead his self-contradiction. In the hurry of the public mind, there is always a danger that many great advantages for the truth should be overlooked: even things seen steadily, yet seen but once and amongst alien objects, are seen to little purpose. Lowered also in their apparent value by the prejudice, that what passes in parliament is but the harmless skirmishing of partisanship, dazzling the eye, but innocuous as the aurora borealis, demonstrations only too certain of coming evils receive but little attention in their earlier stages. Yet undoubtedly, if the laws applicable to conspiracy can in any way be evaded, we may see by the extensive cabal now organizing itself in England for aiding the Irish conspiracy to overthrow the Irish Protestant church, that we have but exchanged one form of agitation for a worse. Worse in what respect? Not as measured simply by the ruin it would cause—between ruin and ruin, there is little reason for choice; but worse, as having all the old supporters that Repeal ever counted, and many others beside. Especially with Repeal agitation recommending itself to the Irish priesthood, and to those whom the priesthood can put in motion, it will recommend itself also and separately to vast multitudes amongst ourselves. It is worse also—not because in the event more ruinous, but because in its means less desperate. All the factious in politics and the schismatic in religion—all those who, caring little or nothing about religion as a spiritual interest, seek to overthrow the present Ministers—all those who (caring little or nothing about politics as a trading interest) seek to overthrow the Church of England—all, again, who are distressed in point of patriotism, as in Ireland many are, hoping to establish a foreign influence upon any prosperous body of native prejudice against British influence, are now throwing themselves, as by a forlorn hope, into this rearmost of their batteries, (but also the strongest)—a deadly and combined struggle to pull down the Irish Protestant establishment. And why? because nothing else is left to them as a hopeful subject of conspiracy, now that the Repeal conspiracy is crushed; and because in its own nature an assault upon Protestantism has always been a promising speculation—sure to draw support from England, whilst Repeal drew none; and because such an assault strikes at the citadel of our strength. For the established church of Ireland is the one main lever by which Great Britain carries out the machinery of her power over the Irish people. The Protestant church is by analogy the umbilical cord through which England connects herself materially with Ireland; through that she propagates her milder influence; that gone, the rest would offer only coercive influence. Without going diffusively into such a point, two vast advantages to the civil administration, from the predominance of a Protestant church in Ireland, meet us at the threshold: 1st, that it moulds by the gentlest of all possible agencies the recusant part of this Irish nation into a growing conformity with the two other limbs of the empire. The Irish population is usually assumed at about one fourth part of the total imperial population. Now, the gradual absorption of so large a section amongst our resources into the temper, sympathies, and moral habits of the rest, is an object to be kept in view by every successive government, let their politics otherwise be what they may; and therefore to be kept in view by all Irish institutions. In Canada everybody is now aware how much this country has been wanting to herself, (that is, wanting to the united interests equally of England and Canada,) in not having operated from the first upon the political dispositions of the old French population by the powerful machinery of her own language, and in some cases of her institutions. Her neglect in this instance she now feels to have been at her own cost, and therefore politically to have been her crime. Granting to her population a certain degree of education, and of familiarity with the English language, certain civic privileges, (as those of voting at political elections, of holding offices, profitable or honorary, &c.,) under such reasonable latitude as to time as might have made the transition easy, England would have prevented the late wicked insurrection in Canada, and gradually have obliterated the external monuments of French remembrances, which have served only to nurse a senseless (because a hopeless) enmity. Now, in Ireland, the Protestant predominance has long since trained and moulded the channels through which flows the ordinary ambition of her national aristocracy. The Popery of Ireland settles and roots itself chiefly in the peasantry of three provinces. The bias of the gentry, and of the aspiring in all ranks, is towards Protestantism. Activity of mind and honourable ambition in every land, where the two forms of Christianity are politically in equilibrium, move in that same line of direction. Undoubtedly the Emancipation bill of 1829 was calculated, or might have seemed calculated, to disturb this old order of tendencies. But against that disturbance, and in defiance of the unexampled liberality shown to Papists upon every mode of national competition, there is still in action (and judging by the condition of the Irish bar, in undiminished action) the old spontaneous tendency of Protestantism to 'go ahead;' the fact being that the original independency and freedom of the Protestant principle not only create this tendency, but also meet and favour it wherever nature has already created it, so as to operate in the way of a perpetual bounty upon Protestant leanings. Here, therefore, is one of the great advantages to every English government from upholding and fostering, in all modes left open by the Emancipation bill, the Protestant principle—viz. as a principle which is the pledge of a continual tendency to union; since, as no prejudice can flatter itself with seeing the twenty-one millions of our Protestant population pass over to Popery, it remains that we encourage a tendency in the adverse direction, long since established and annually increasing amongst the six and a half Irish Papists. Thus only can our total population be fused; and without that fusion, it will scarcely be hoped that we can enjoy the whole unmutilated use of our own latent power.