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TO CORRESPONDENTS.

All communications for the EDITOR of the CITIZEN must, in future, be addressed to the care of Mr. MACHEN, 8, D'OLIER-STREET, who has been appointed our sole publisher.

Advertisements and Books for Review to be forwarded to the same.

We cannot undertake to return short pieces, either prose or poetry.

Contributions intended for insertion in the succeeding Number must be forwarded on or before the 7th instant.

The article on Art-Unions was printed off before we received the "Royal Irish Art-Union's Report for 1839-40," which is very full and satisfactory, and most creditable to its enterprising and indefatigable secretary.

Our country correspondents shall receive immediate answers by post. Town correspondents will find replies at our publishers.

Our valued friend R. has a second time disappointed us. We hope indisposition is not again the

cause...

Printed by Webb and Chapman, Great Brunswick-street, Dublin.

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"I HAVE HEARD DIVINES AFFIRM THAT NOTHING IS SO LIKELY TO DRAW DOWN VENGEANCE FROM HEAVEN, AS UNIVERSAL OPPRESSION; AND HOW FAR THIS MATTER MAY CONCERN THEM, THEIR WORSHIPS THE LANDLORDS ARE AT FULL LEISURE TO CONSIDER."-SWIFT.

THE united parliament is about to meet. Contending parties are busily accoutreing for the fray. Each shaft is freshly dipt in hate, and every shield is burnished bright anew. Power-the great hereditary cause of feud-divides, as it has time immemorial done, the leading combatants. Meaner motives stimulate their partizans of every degree. How this campaign shall differ from its forty predecessors,-reckoning from the time, when the three aristocracies of these three isles agreed with one another to make joint-stock work of legislation, or to what new themes of war, the running accompaniment of "earnest requests to attend," will be adapted,-time alone can tell. The buffo and bravura will doubtless be sustained by the accustomed skill of a Sinclair and a Stanley; and the expectations of those, who are used to listen to the plaintive and unutterably mournful airs of an Inglis or a Winchelsea, may hope in confidence for a resumption of their gratification. For "fantasie" and paganinic strains mingling all varieties of modulation, and rapidly obliterating, by unlooked-for whimsies, the memory of that which went before, who shall aspire to rival the illustrious Lord Harry Harlequin? And for the admirers of that subtle art, whose magic is to keep up a succession of false concords, and where the listener expects the bold and honest tone

VOL. III. NO. XVI.

(musicians term the major), to for ever baulk this hope, and reiterate the flat and fearing tone (musicians call the minor key), most touchingly expressive of the feelings of men doomed long to figure in a minority, who shall emulate the master touch of Peel? Meanwhile their opponents, once so eloquent and promiseful, threaten to sing dumb, unless, perhaps, upon some ill-appreciated foreign theine, whereon, for aught we know, their execution may be most prodigious; but as for any familiar subject, there seems as little chance of aught exhilarating or vigorous from them, as there is of inspiriting notes from the costliest and best-gilt set of organpipes that were ever ranged in row, when there is no wind in the bellows.

All which, could we look on and listen unconcernedly, were amusing and farcical enough. But we have no heart to be merry, even when we cannot help, now and then, laughing at the elaborate mummery that we have seen annually enacted, by the motley multitude who, about this season of the year, take to the expensive amusement of wearing the masks, and stumbling through the parts of legislators. We are rather tired of opening those huge parcels which are remitted to us at the end of each session (labelled"acts," and thereby pretending to disclose some thing or things done,) and of finding, after weary rummaging through the entire

bundle, nothing substantial done, or half done, or for all that appears in the wrappings or foldings, even so much as attempted to be done. And we are sick and weary of seeing the few earnest men that are, in reality, disposed to turn their office of representatives to some good account for their country, doomed to strive in vain.

So long as this elegant amusement of act-of-parliament-making was kept up, merely as a relaxation or gentle exercise for the nobility and gentry, the do-nothing mode of work was no great harm; indeed, all things considered, it may be concluded that the less such worthies did, the better. But after the Relief Bill and the Reform Act had solemnly declared, each in its own, but both in the most emphatic way, that the people are the only source of legitimate power, we naturally hoped that the reign of fiddle faddle was over; that the undressed wounds of centuries would be tended; that an end was begun of iniquities, that had, for so many generations in Ireland, sat enthroned upon the fraud-andforce-propped lie-that this fair land, which God had given us, was not ours to own or to enjoy, but the rightful heritage of an antinational, irresponsible, aristocracy, self-invested with boundless power.

We did expect much-we had a right to expect much-for much was due to us. It is an insolent mockery to say, that the people of Ireland should be content with the pretended concessions of religious liberty, or the ten-pound franchise (which latter was hardly given 'till it was judicially rendered, to a great extent, void). These were no concessions, made by repentant wrong, to an injured people. They were terms-reluctant, tardy, and extorted terms, wrung from the fears of our masters; and that man is a blockhead, or a spy, who dares to palter with the nation's wants and miseries, by sounding the dishonest chime of great concessions in our ears. Again and again, we say, concessions there have as yet been none. Emancipation and Reform are two great pledges unredeemed. The fruit of them is still to come; for what did their advocates promise to the body of the people as their result when they should be obtained, but equal and just laws, and the restoration of long lost peace, freedom, and security. 'Twas put, as it were a bargain, between the people and their keepers. Crime and tyranny are mutual child and parent. Destroy the one, and you destroy the other. Let tranquillity be the price of freedom,-let the rights of property be respected, and its duties will be performed in a better spirit. As earnests of

these good intentions, the relief bill, and the ten-pound franchise, were proposed; as ultimate objects, they were comparatively worthless, for statutes are, at best, but a pile of dead words, whereinto, if the animating spirit enter not, they remain inefficacious, save as a monument of popular disappointment, and senatorial insincerity.

Was not this put bitterly to the proof in our case? Religious equality was proclaimed in 1829, yet the old monopoly of the public service was fraudulently maintained for six years after; and not until the fear of a Tory resumption of power was unmistakeably before their eyes in 1835, could the Whigs of England be roused to the abandonment of the anti-catholic policy of their predecessors. Parliamentary reform was decreed for Ireland in 1833, and the immediate consequence which had in Scotland and England followed from it-corporate reform -was withheld for seven years; and in the end it has been meagrely granted, and with manifold unjust and dishonest drawbacks.

Above all, peace and security for our lives, liberties, and properties, was a thousand times declared to be the great end of these muchpromising changes. Political inequality, and political excitement, had led, it was said, to turbulence; and turbulence was made the pretext for distrust on the part of the government, and their continuance of Orange yeomanry and police. Another way of governing was to be tried. The confidence of the people was no longer to be a bar to office; the wishes of the people were to be the guiding stars of legislation; the principle of self-rule was to be acknowledged, and its developement was to be worked out under a United legislature, which pledged itself to the common sovereign of the two kingdoms, to do for Ireland all that an Irish parliament could do. Thus, if self-rule of one kind was denied, self-rule of another was to be secured; and this concession, as it was called, amounted just to this, that the people should not be treated as aliens in their own land, that they should be protected by the imperial senate and administration, from local power, extortion and misrule.

The condition upon which this vast concession of leave to live a quiet life in our own country was accorded us, was, that crime and agrarian combination should cease. We have kept our half of the bargain ; never before was there so little violence; never so much forbearance under multiplied provocations; never so great a disposition evinced, even by those districts hitherto rent by social warfare, to wait peaceably the

We make the charge to serve no interest of any petty faction, nor to hurt the official character of a well intentioned administration; but in the name and for the sake of the trampled and insulted thousands, who are left defenceless at the mercy of the most unsparing, unpitying, and widespread combination, that ever yet was formed against the liberties and properties of a people.

amendment of the law, and its improved administration, instead of resorting to the once too ordinary resource of wild and lawless vengeance. With one or two memorable, because isolated exceptions, whose rumour fell upon the unaccustomed ear, like the last thunders of the subsiding storm, public tranquillity has not, during late years, been roused from its dream of increased and increasing security. Would that the time had been improved to better purpose, by our rulers, that so great an opportunity-country, and especially into the manner (we say not of settling, but of evincing a capacity for, and a desire of settling,) the great social questions that have for centuries been working up the minds of men to hereditary fury and despair, had not been suffered by the imperial legislature to pass

away.

We call loudly and earnestly upon Parliament for enquiry into the state of the

in which its peace is menaced, and its prosperity retarded, by the perversion of the laws of landlord and tenant, as they at present stand. We emphatically assert that life and property neither are, nor can be made secure, until some strong and effectual check is put, not upon the rights, but upon the wrongs of property. It is no longer the few who are insecure; it is the many,-the industrious, the resident, the moral, the

But such has been our fate. The possession of land, and the laws relative to its tenure, all the fraud of absenteeism, and all the iniquity of the ruinous ejectment sys-million-numbering people. The combination tem, as it is carried on under the perverted forms of law, all that eats like a canker into the national frame,-all that lies, a moral, social, and political load on the popular heart, has been left untouched and unalleviated,—has never been so much as enquired into, by the united wisdom of the Lords and Commons in parliament assem.. bled. And yet, we do affirm, that never at any time in the history of Ireland, was the duty and policy of legislative interposition so necessary for the safety of the people, and for the maintenance of public order. Public order still reigns, thank God; long, long, may its authority subsist unbroken. Without it, improvement is a chimera, trade a cheat, science a fugitive, art a beggar, country a once beauteous garden trodden down into an aceldama. And they call themselves by what conservative name they will-they are the anarchists, the revolutionists, the destroyers, who abet and foster the continuance of that aristocratic tyranny, which leaves the mass of the people insecure in their properties and lives.

"Insecurity of life and property in Ireland" has hitherto been appropriated as a charge by the enemies of our country. At the beginning of each succeeding session, we have been told "life and property in Ireland are insecure," and that were enquiry granted, they could be clearly shown to be so. It high is time to put an end to the hypocritic cry, by declaring as we now do, in a far different sense from that in which our libellers use the phrase, that property and existence itself are insecure in Ireland.

which menaces,-aye, and is fearfully fast undermining all the foundations of law and order in the state, is no longer that of the shebeen house, or the ribbon lodge, but is one concocted in high places, and which holds its festivals with insolent publicity. Land, the great, and unhappily the only means of livelihood to seven-eighths of the Irish people,-land is the object of the new -(as it used to be of the old)—agrarian outrages; but the difference between the two species of combination is immeasurable. Agrarian disturbance was formerly the offence of the poor. In the days of the Whiteboy, Rockite, and Terry Alt associations, the provocations were often great; but they were local, and generally personal. A few bad men, in a particular county, strove to turn the screw of extortion tighter than had been the custom there; and their lands were ploughed up, or their cattle maimed, or their drivers injured; and then the law, blind to the thousand exasperating causes, was invoked; disturbance was repressed for the time; and when a sufficient number of the peasantry were hanged-(it mattered little whether they were the guilty parties or not, to say nothing of the sort of evidence they were convicted on)-life and property were pronounced once more secure; and bad landlords might distrain and extort for the next seven years, in peace and comfort to themselves and bailiffs. But the entire system of things is now altered. For their own purposes the aristocracy of those days desired to have a numerous tenantry. The poor man might be oppressed, might be ca

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