XX. 1822. CHAP. to any motive but the very worst one by the lower; they insisted upon unanimity in petty juries when the inhabitants were so divided by passion and opinion, that it was scarcely possible to find twelve men of opposite creeds in it who could agree on any subject; they enfranchised the forty-shilling freeholders, and introduced popular elections among a peasantry so illiterate that they could vote only at the dictation of their landlords or their priests, and so tumultuous, when excited, that no votes opposed to their predilections could, during a contested. election, be given in safety, but by voters escorted to the polling-place by dragoons, and protected there by military and police with fixed bayonets. Thence a constant state of excitement in the public mind, a disastrous uncertainty in the administration of justice, and a total disbelief on the part of the peasantry in the equity of its decisions. Everything came to depend on the criminal courts, or at least was thought to depend on the chance or official dexterity which had given a majority on the grand or petty jury to one or other party; and the courts of justice, when the awful scene of a trial for life or death was going on, were surrounded by an agitated crowd, who alternately followed with loud lamentations the cars which conveyed persons convicted, whom they believed to be innocent, to exile or the scaffold; or escorted with loud shouts assassins acquitted, whom they knew to be guilty, in a civic ovation to the homes which they had stained by their crimes. As a natural mode of defeating the punishment of crime in a country so convulsed, and cursed rather than blessed by the institutions suited to a different race or state of society, the intimidation of juries and witnesses was thoroughly organised, and carried to such a height as, in cases which interested the people, rendered a conviction, even when guilt was certain, always uncertain, often impossible. The most violent threats were liberally applied by markings on doors, anonymous letters, or other XX. 1822. wise, to any one concerned in the conviction of the CHAP. patriots who had hazarded their lives in the cause of religion and the people; and so frequently were these threats carried into execution that not only were the nerves of the jurymen often shaken, and verdicts contrary to the clearest evidence returned, but the important witnesses were so endangered that they could find safety only within the walls of a jail; and giving evidence on a trial was more certainly the prelude to removal, at the Government expense, to a distant land, than the commission of the greatest and most atrocious crime. Thence an amount of crime in proportion to the population, an impunity to offenders and uncertainty in the administration of justice, which strangely contrasted with the comparatively regular and steady march of crime, and its small amount in the neighbouring island. And still more dreadful, the impunity for crime and the encouragement to its commission did not cease even with sentence of death and execution, for an applauding multitude attended the last footsteps of the murderer, and a fanatical priest promised him eternal rewards for his self-sacrifice in what they deemed his country's cause. To a country labouring under so many and such vari * COMMITTED IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND, FROM 1822 To 1834. -PORTER'S Progress of the Nation, 658, 667. The population of Ireland at this time was about 7,500,000; of Scotland, 2,500,000; and of England, 13,000,000-numbers which strangely contrast with the opposite proportions of crime. VOL. IV. B CHAP. XX. 1822. 17. Catholic emancipa proposed Liberals and Irish mal contents. ous causes of evil, no one remedy, how powerful soever, could prove effectual; and it was only by slow degrees, and after a length of time, that the greatest combination of them could be expected to produce any sensible effect. tion the As the source of them was mainly to be found in the only remedy habits of the people, so it was only in a change of those by English habits-of necessity the work of time-that the spring of improvement was to be found. Nothing could be expected to be effective but such causes as should relieve the mass of wretchedness which overspread the country, elevate the wages of labour, lessen the competition for land, and furnish the means of emigration to such as could not obtain a share of it. An expanded currency, which should raise the price of agricultural produce, the sole staple of the people; a prudent but yet liberal poorlaw, which should compel the Irish landowners and their mortgagees, enjoying between them an income of £13,000,000 from the labour of the cultivators, to relieve the distress they had so large a share in creating; a vast system of emigration, conducted at the public expense, and drawing off the really destitute instead of those who had some capital, and could do well at home; and a strict and rigorous administration of justice, in a way beyond the reach of violence or intimidation, could alone be relied on to prove effectual. But nothing of this was thought of. Government firmly persevered in a monetary system which, by lowering the price of agricultural produce a half, destroyed the remuneration of rural industry; they resisted all attempts to introduce a poor-law into a country overflowing with indigence beyond any state in Europe; the House of Commons was counted out the moment any motion for emigration at the public expense was made; and the friends of Ireland, on both sides of the Channel, concentrated all their efforts on political agitation to attain Catholic emancipation-that is, open the doors of the House of Lords to a dozen highly respectable Catholic peers, and of the Commons to forty or fifty nominees of the Catholic priesthood. . XX. 1822. 18. that mea They gained their object, as the succeeding chapter will CHAP. testify with what effect the succeeding volumes of this history will unfold. Without outstripping the march of events, it is sufficient to observe, what is known to all the world, Effects of that this step, however loudly called for by justice and sure." equity, has utterly failed, on the admission of its warmest advocates, in removing one real grievance of Ireland, while it has introduced many to which the country had hitherto been a stranger. The agitation for Repeal of the Union succeeded that for Catholic Emancipation; monster meetings were held in every part of the island, to the distraction of the minds of the peasantry, and the annihilation of all feeling of security in the realm; corporate reform gave the priesthood the command of many boroughs, parliamentary reform and the Catholic Association of most counties; popular privileges were extended to the people in every direction, and popular influence became the ruling power in Dublin. The consequences of thus extending to a nation in pupilarity the privileges of manhood were soon apparent. Capital shunned the peopled and agitated shores of the Emerald Isle; emigration, meeting with no encouragement from Government, was suspended; the competition for land-the only means of existence-became greater than ever; fiendish outrages, the consequence of the dread of losing it, more frequent; the renewal of the Coercion Act a matter of necessity even to those who had most loudly condemned it; and at length Providence, seeing remedy by human means hopeless, interposed with decisive effect-a famine of the thirteenth fell upon the multitudes of the nineteenth century; two millions* of inhabitants disappeared from Ireland in five years between starvation and exile ; XX. 1822. CHAP. and now the annual emigration of 250,000 cultivators at once attests the consequences of the commercial policy of England in recent times, and has designated in a manner not to be misunderstood the only remedy left for the sufferings of the sister kingdom. 19. state of Ire land in 1823, and The extreme distress of the inhabitants of Ireland, Disturbed through the years 1821 and 1822, in consequence of the contraction of the currency, and consequent depreciation prosecutions in the price of agricultural, almost its only produce, to in the Dub- nearly a half of its former amount, continued throughout lin theatre. the whole of the succeeding year. The insult to the for the riot Lord-Lieutenant in the theatre of Dublin, on the 14th December 1822, which has been already noticed, led to prosecutions, first before the Grand Jury of that city, and then before the Court of King's Bench, on an ex officio information, both of which proved ineffectual; the natural, and, in that country, too frequent result of the requiring, according to English law, unanimity in juries, in a country where, from the unhappy division of parties, both on religious and political subjects, it is seldom, in cases of an exciting nature, to be expected. This abortive proceeding led only to mutual recriminations by the Attorney-General and Grand Jury of Dublin, which had no other effect but to augment the irritation between them, and inflame the general discontent. The consequence was, an inquiry by the House of Commons into the charges preferred by the Attorney-General against 1 Ann. Reg. the Grand Jury, and by the opposite party against the High Sheriff of Dublin, for alleged partiality in the selection of names for the array. The proceedings in Parlia 1823, 49, 60. |