"But, if really fired at, and therefore much frightened, as he doubtless would be, it was not a loss to him. With the facility which the law in Ireland gives him as a landlord, he at once threw those tenants into jail with whom he had been involved in litigation. Consequently, before they could prosecute him for damages, or before they could be witnesses in another case, they had themselves to be tried for attempted murder!
"Patrick Ring was one of those arrested; and though several hundreds of people, some of them gentlemen of rank and property, knew that he had been in the Catholic chapel for an hour before and an hour after the time the shot was alleged to have been fired, and that at the distance of two miles, yet he was kept in prison, in solitary confinement, not allowed to see any friend, nor even a lawyer, for several weeks. He was not even examined before a magistrate. This last fact in the administration of the law is, I believe, peculiar to Ireland only. Whether it is consistent with, or contrary to law, I cannot say. In England we consider it but justice to the accused and the accuser, to bring them face to face before a magistrate at the earliest opportunity. But in this case, the landlord (and I am told such a thing is quite common in all such cases) put Pat Ring in prison, kept him there three weeks in close confinement, apart even from a legal adviser, and then allowed him to go out without even taking him before a magistrate, or offering any evidence against him.
"We may easily conceive circumstances which would warrant the landlord to suspect this man, so as to have him taken up, and which might ultimately turn out to be so weak as to prevent the production of any evidence whatever. Had the landlord merely put Pat Ring in prison, and let him out again after finding, through a period of three weeks, that he could get no evidence against him, there would be little to complain of, save that the law should not compel the magistrates to bring the accused up for examination, or that the prison authorities should not let the prisoner have an interview with a legal adviser; but the landlord did much more. While Pat Ring was in jail, the landlord sent and made a wreck of his house and farm; took the roof, thatch, and wood off the barn, stable, and dwelling-house, save in one small portion of the latter; and every handful of the thatch and wood so pulled down was carried away to the landlord's own premises. The doors and windows he also carried away; pulled down the gates of the farm-yard and the garden, and the garden-wall. These gates were iron, and had been erected by the tenant a few years before at considerable expense. The houses were also all of his own erection; the thatch and timber of the roof, carried away by the landlord, was Pat Ring's own property; and all was taken away, and the whole place wrecked, without any warrant whatever for so doing; without any right whatever, save the right which, by the laxity of the law and the dominancy of a faction, a landlord, belonging to that dominant faction, may create for himself; without any authority whatever, save the power of his own high hand, against which the law is powerless.
"Pat Ring, after being kept in prison for three weeks, apart from every friend and adviser, and apart from every human creature, save the spies with which every prison in Ireland abounds—(persons who are kept there at the public expense, and who are put to sleep with such men as Pat Ring; and who, pretending to make a confidant of the fresh prisoner, tell tales of the assaults and murders which, as a trap, they profess to have been concerned in—they urging the new prisoner to confess all, to split on his accomplices, and take the reward of £100 at once,—except such companions as these, some of whom I saw produced as witnesses for the Crown at the Kilkenny assizes, thus learning from their own mouths the nature of their diabolical employment)—excepting these, to whom, as Pat Ring declares, he indignantly answered again and again that he had nothing to confess, he saw no human being during his incarceration—was liberated, and went joyfully home; but when he went there, alas! his home was a ruin."
We suppose we need scarcely point out the absurdity of such a statement as this. Some magistrate must have committed this man; the jailer could not receive him without a committal, nor set him at large [42] without a discharge; although, from the account given, the inference may be easily drawn that, on his own will, Shee had thrown Ring into prison. If falsely imprisoned, he had his action against the magistrate who committed him. The committal, which the jailer holds for his own security, would discover the person who had acted so illegally. If any man acted as Shee is said to have done in this instance, the law is not to be blamed—for it forbids such conduct: the government officers who permitted it to be violated, are the really guilty parties. And here again we may ask—why were not the government called on to explain the conduct of their officials, by Lord John Russell, who read and recommended the book to the attention of Sir Robert Peel? But in addition to the necessity of having Ring thrown into jail, to exhibit the power of the landlords, it was necessary, for our author's purposes, that he should be put out of the way, in order to account for an apology given by the editor of a local newspaper to this Mr Shee.
"An action was brought against the proprietor of the journal for a malicious libel, in calling this gentleman a 'notorious landlord.' A man who had, in two years and a half, had above two hundred disputes with his peasantry, not half of which I have yet even alluded to, but all of which, alluded to and related, had occurred previous to that time—such a man, to prosecute for being called 'notorious,' had good confidence.
"But he had also a good case. It would be scouted out of Westminster Hall, but it was a good case in Ireland. An English judge, after hearing evidence for the defence in such a case—evidence in justification—would not sum up to the jury, or, if he began his summary, the jury would stop him with an intimation that their minds were made up! But to the Irish jury—the special jury of landlords before whom this case was about to be brought—the proprietor of the Irish newspaper looked forward with a certainty of being convicted on a criminal charge, the punishment of which would have probably been one or two years' imprisonment and a heavy fine.
"He might have hoped for a verdict in his favour had the case stood for a common jury, or for a special jury in any of the counties where he was known, or where his paper circulated. When it was intimated to him that the trial would not take place in Kilkenny, he urged that the venue might be laid in Waterford, or Tipperary, or Wexford, or Carlow, or in the Queen's County, where something was known of each of the parties; but no, the venue was laid in the county of Dublin, where the gentlemen who would form the special jury were all of the landlord class, and nearly all belonging to the dominant church-and-state party. In that county nothing was known of either plaintiff or defendant, save that the first was a distinguished Protestant partisan and that the other was a Catholic, and proprietor of a liberal newspaper. Of their private characters nothing was known.
"Still the defendant resolved to go to trial, and justify the epithet 'notorious' as applied to the landlord. He intended taking several of the worst-used tenants up as witnesses; and he also obtained the official records of the petty sessions, quarter sessions, and assize courts, to put in as evidence to show the overwhelming amount of litigation carried on by the landlord with his tenantry. He resolved on doing all this, though sure of being condemned to imprisonment and a fine by the special jury; he judged, from the well-known reputation of that class of men, and from what he had seen other newspaper proprietors receive at their hands for publishing the oppressive conduct of landlords; but he resolved on justifying by evidence, in the hope that a public trial, at which such witnesses as the persecuted tenants of plaintiff would appear, would draw public attention to their unfortunate condition. He had chosen Patrick Ring and John Ryan, the worst-used of the tenants, and one or two others, as witnesses; but what was his dismay when he found Patrick Ring once more thrown into jail, as also the others, at the instance of the landlord, on the charge of attempting to shoot him!
"Thus, without his witnesses, the defendant, after incurring the expense of about £100 in preparing his defence, was glad to get out of the case in any shape. He made a public and most humble apology, paid all expenses, and the prosecution was dropped. As soon as this was effected, Patrick Ring, but for whose imprisonment on an accusation of murder the trial would have gone on, 'was again allowed to walk out of jail, without having undergone any examination—without having had any evidence produced against him.'"
The juries of the county Dublin are certainly the most independent, and least likely to be prejudiced in favour of a landlord, that can be found. They are in a great measure composed of wealthy merchants, who reside in the neighbourhood of the city; and every one knows that a judge's summons would have procured the attendance of Ring at the trial; but it was necessary to find an excuse for this abject apology.
We cannot, in the present instance, impute the conduct of this truth-telling authority to ignorance; we must attribute it to his wish to make the British public believe that all those civil bill processes were at the suit of landlords against tenants—to the desire or the necessity he felt himself under of sacrificing all principle to the objects for the accomplishment of which he was employed. He must know that nineteen-twentieths of those civil bills are actions for debts brought by shopkeepers against their customers, or by one peasant against another—for money lent, or for the price of provisions sold them: he must know (if he knows any thing) that perhaps not fifty, out of the whole 4318, are for rent; and that, where rent is at all sued for by process, it is only in cases where the landlord takes the tenant's I O U, in order to give him more time for what was long since due. The landlord can at any time distrain for his rent; what object, then, would he have in incurring expense, and encountering delay, to procure a decree, which, when obtained, would only restrict his former power? All this does he know; and yet he quotes the number of processes issued by the most litigious people on earth against each other, as a proof of the tyranny of the landlords, and as the fruitful source of poverty and crime.
We have to apologise for the length of our remarks on those two productions. The one contains, we doubt not, the sincere opinions of a well-meaning, but very silly gentleman; while the other bears upon its unprincipled statements the stamp of premeditated dishonesty. Yet it is upon authorities such as these that the Irish gentry are to be condemned, and their estates confiscated; upon authorities such as these that the interests of men, whose greatest crime is attachment to British connexion, are to be sacrificed to greedy agitators, and a ferocious and idle people. Sir Robert Peel may, perhaps, without danger, give an extension of the franchise—the corporations are all, with one solitary exception, (Belfast,) as revolutionary as they can be made; and the Roman Catholic bishops may not be able to obtain political ascendancy over any more counties than those already subject to their sway; but we would call on him to pause and consider well before he disgusts the best friends of England, by lending attention to the unfounded statements of revolutionary priests, promulgated by mercenary writers; or the legislative quackeries of a disappointed, dishonest, and despicable faction.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Ireland—The Landlord and Tenant Question—Lord Normanby's Speech—Mr Wiggins's Book, "A Cry from Ireland."
[30] One would think there were no poor-houses.
[31] Scotland has been more favoured in this respect. Ample details on the point mentioned, and on every other relating to its physical, moral, and economical state, may be found in the New Statistical Account—a work which places the country under great obligations to the clergy of the Established Church, who have furnished the accounts of their parishes, and which display, in general, a range of intelligence in the highest degree creditable to their order.