IN the papers of a few days since, we have the report of a meeting of the magistrates of the county of Tipperary, which, as being one of the most Popish counties of Ireland, is, of course, the most lawless, furious, and bloody. The magistrates, consisting of all the principal men of the county, with Lord Donoughmore, the Lord-Lieutenant, at their head, addressed the Viceroy for protection, represented life and property as wholly at the mercy of the villains who have been let loose on them by the spirit of insurrection, and declared the county to be in a state verging on utter ruin. They came to this meeting generally armed, in some instances, with their arms visible. The Lord-Lieutenant closed the meeting as early as possible, observing that he did so, "that gentlemen might be able to reach their homes before nightfall." And this is the country for which Popery pledged its pacification, How can English commerce or English capital 'venture there? How far is such a state of society at this moment from open war? Even this formidable question is scarcely left dubious. The Dublin Evening Post, the Government organ in Ireland, pronounces that the crisis has come, and fiercely recommends "Agitation." We have in it, of late, long and laboured appeals on the theme "We must agitate." "The nation must be agitated anew." Agitation must go through the island."

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May not we of this island, being plain men, venture to ask, what is the object of all this labour of agitation? There is no such want of either feelings or tongue in the Irish peasant, that, if he is aggrieved, he cannot comprehend his injury, and speak of it loudly. In England, if we find any thing to complain of, we complain; if nothing, we hold our peace. We ask, why the same process may not exist in Ireland? Why, if the peasantry are the most suffering, unhappy, broken, and so forth race on earth, as the orators inform us, do they require all this agitation to make them say so? Why, if their chains still clank on their legs; and why, if they feel themselves deprived of law, and bound hand in foot in the

links of British iniquity, &c. &c., cannot they be left to say something of this for themselves, without being assembled by placards and cows' horns, and gathered on commons, and marched by platoons into market towns, and listening to three hours' harangues, merely to know that they are desperately unhappy? We should think, that to make this discovery, they might be trusted to their own ideas of discomfort. And that where they did not complain until they were ordered to do so, the unhappiness was not of a very severe species. In short, that the man is not much hurt who does not feel it, and that there is a considerable probability of his not feeling much where he says nothing on the subject.

We admit that this silence would be by no means to the advantage of the O'Connell dynasty, If the populace do not riot, what becomes of the rent? If orators do not itinerate and madden the country day by day, what becomes of murder and robbery night by night? and, if robbery and murder are no more, who can doubt that the death-warrant of the party is signed? Therefore" agitate, agitate, agitate," is their policy and their proverb; hurry through the land, summoning the people from their work, and defrauding them of their wages, and swear to them by the Virgin, and all their other gods and goddesses of wood and stone, that they are the most wretched of human beings, however they may not have found it out for themselves; that the chief want of the Irish peasant is to be able to vote for a Popish member; or, in process of time, to be a member himself; and that, until Ballot, Triennial Parliaments, and Repeal are gained, he ought not to lay his head on his pillow, or the pike out of his hand. The haranguers, who vociferate all this sanguinary falsehood, know in their souls that the effect is, and will be, the infinite riot, mischief, and misery which overspread the Popish provinces of Ireland. But what is it all to them? The word still is" agitate, agitate, agitate." "This," said the Duke of Wellington, in his public rebuke to one of the silliest of peers, " means nothing in

the ears of the rabble but rebellion;" and common sense will say the same, whatever noble Lords in their folly, or any other miserable hunters for popularity and contemptible echoes of Mr O'Connell may think it. Even allowing that such men can have no wish to see a rebellion, yet the mischief is the same; the peasantry catch the word, it is first their rallying-point, then their war-whoop, and then come assassination, burning, and massacre.

We say solemnly, with full conviction, and not without the deepest regret, that it is most dangerous and most foolish to believe any Papist, let him pledge himself by any oath, however voluntary, formal, and distinct, upon any public subject which he may find it desirable to violate. On this we have the most fatal evidence. Of course the Papist, in the ordinary circumstances of life, may be trustworthy. Nor do we doubt, that even on public matters, there are many Popish individuals of honour and manliness who will preserve their honour; but it is not with gentlemen that we shall always have to deal in these matters, it is not with gentlemen that we have to deal at this moment. We have hourly proof that they will fly out into the most open contempt of every obligation on the first opportunity. All may go on smoothly in smooth times; but let the emergency come, let the struggle be imminent, let the rabble of Popery be called into the contest, and from that hour all obligations disappear like chaff before the wind. The most solemn oaths are laughed at, and we are laughed at too for the shallowness of being duped by such notorious, habitual, and disgusting perfidy. What must in fact be the utter scorn of the validity of an oath among a set of low adventurers like the Popish tail, headed by a low adventurer like their present leader, and with this rule of their Church held up before their eyes "No oath, contrary to ecclesiastical utility, is binding ?”

In the original, Juramentum contra utilitatem ecclesiasticum præstitum non tenet. (Decretal. Lib. xi., tit. 24, cap. 27.) "Ecclesiastical utility" confessedly meaning the interests of the Church. Let, then, the Protestant see what a boundless latitude is here given for perjury of every shape and shade. The "interests of the Church" may extend to every thing belonging

to public and private life. The Popish labourer, who takes land on the condition of paying his rent and tithe, has only to find himself safe from the actual grasp of the law in refusing either, or both. The priest comes to him, when his rent and tithe are ready, and tells him that to pay the Protestant clergyman is against the good of his church. "But it is the condition of my lease," says the peasant, "I made the promise voluntarily, and I am bound by the condition." "Are you a true son of the Church," says the reverend father, " a worshipper of the Holy Virgin, and a worthy subject of his holiness the Pope? If you are, see this decree. No oath against the interests of the Church is binding. In the name then of the holy mother Church, I absolve you from any sin on the subject. Keep your money in your pocket." Requests of this order are too palatable not to be easily complied with. The peasant keeps the tithe; he is summoned before the magistrate to pay; he shoots the bailiff who summons him. A night or two after he burns the clergyman's house. He then becomes a member of those hordes of nightmarauding villains, whom the Agitator calls "hereditary bondsmen," and who are ordered to recollect, that, "who would be free himself must strike the blow." The work of night soon puts an end to the labour of day. His farm goes to ruin. He is unable to pay his rent. The landlord, after many a day of sufferance, is forced to eject him, he serves a return to the writ, in the shape of a letter, "ordering the landlord to prepare his coffin." The letter is followed by shooting the landlord in the face of day, shooting the tenant who had been put into the farm, shooting the magistrate who had signed the writ, and shooting the witnesses who have seen him shoot the magistrate. This would seem monstrous in New South Wales, in Caffraria, in the American forests; but it is the every day work of Ireland. It exhibits itself on the face of the Government Gazette week by week. The grave has scarcely closed on the mutilated remains of Mr Keefe, a highly respectable man, a land agent and maltster in Thurles, employing sixty men daily, who was thus murdered, and more than murdered, savagely mutilated, crushed,

battered and torn, as if by wild beasts, and not by men. It is but a short time since Mr Stony, a man of fortune and a magistrate, who gave much employment to the peasantry, and bore an estimable character, was coolly attacked, while going at six o'clock in the evening to dine with a neighbour ing gentleman. A fellow walked up to him with a lantern, which he held to his face; in the instant after thus making sure of their man, another ruffian fired a carbine at him, which left him for dead, with fifteen slugs in his body. And for deeds like these the priests give absolution, even if the murderer should not seek it. Every peasant is ordered to attend confession once a quarter; and in what instance do we ever hear that absolution has been refused? No, the blackest villain is as sure of getting it, on paying the proper fee, as the purest girl of fifteen. And this is Popery, practical, working, real Popery; and this is the horrid superstition, which, with all its horrors, we see forcing itself into England, absolutely controlling the legislature, and leading the wretched Cabinet exactly wherever Mr O'Connell, in his insolence, commands.

It is now Radical and Revolutionist, and clamours as loudly as the loudest Republican in England, France, or America, for the Ballot, Universal Suffrage, Short Parliaments, and all the other notorious instruments of the fiercest and most latitudinarian democracy. Yet, what is this but a new pertidy, a more scandalous attempt to delude, a more wilful and sanguinary allegiance to the father of all false hood. The nature of Popery is tyranny, it hates freedom in every form, it commands spiritual and bodily prostration before the most unreasoning and unmingled despotism that the world has ever seen; yet now it clamours for more than freedom, for the madness of freedom! In what other spirit does it stimulate the populace into this frenzy than to work the downfall of the Constitution by the populace, and then clasp the exhausted lunatic in its chain? In the name of our endangered religion, in the name of our scandalized liberty, in the name of our insulted GOD, we must resist this tyranny. Life would be but one long disgrace, one consummate misery, one hopeless

VOL. XLIV. NO, CCLXXVIII,

captivity, if we suffered Popery once to be the law of England. And why shall we say that it will not be thus law? Look to what it has done in Ireland already. By the supineness of the successive Cabinets of England since the middle of the last century; by the poverty to which they doomed the Irish Church, and which paralyzed all its efforts; by the egregious impolicy of relaxing the penal laws with one hand, while with the other they actually thwarted the means and desires of the clergy to spread Protestantism through the people, and thus render their new liberty safe;The Papist thus obtained power without morals to use it; was released from the civil restraints, rendered of old essential by his spirit of rebellion, before any attempt was made to extinguish that spirit of all evil; and thus what was meant as liberality was turned into license; what was meant as reconciliation was turned into revenge; and what was boasted of as securing perpetual fidelity, has secured nothing but a sullen, venomous, and unappeasable thirst of rebellion.

Or, let us take the contrast between the Papist soliciting privileges and the Papist possessing them. Who ever heard before 1829 of a Popish demand for Ballot, Universal Suffrage, or the other mixtures of nonsense and atrocity which compound the Republican creed? No; all he asked was to have his humble share of the Constitution as it was. His plea was "faith long proved" to that Constitution; his pledge was "sincere, indisputable, and voluntary allegiance" to the existing order of the country; his oath was to the most solemn avoidance of all trespass on the rights, titles, and property of the Established Church! The Legislature was forewarned that this was all a desperate system of artifice; that the supplication was for a surrender; that the humility was hypocrisy; that the voice of the beggar outside the door would be turned into the roar of the robber within. The forewarning was supported by history, by reason, and by scripture. It was disregarded. And now; we are fighting in the last ditch of the Constitution!

The documents proving the pledges of the Papists are as numerous as their violations. Let us confine ourselves to one, the petition presented to both

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Houses in 1805. We give a few abstracts of this long, laboured, and incontrovertible bond. It begins by a declaration of their perfect allegiance to the Protestant throne!

"That your petitioners are stead fastly attached to the person, family, and government of their most gracious Sovereign (George III), and that they contemplate with rational and decided predilection the admirable principles of the British Constitution." So much for those who now cannot exist without Universal Suffrage, &c. They then state their reverence for an oath.

"Your petitioners most humbly state, that they have solemnly and publicly taken the oaths by law prescribed to his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, as tests of political and moral principles, and confidently appeal to the sufferings which they have so long endured, and the sacrifices which they still make, rather than violate their consciences by taking oaths of a religious or spiritual import contrary to their belief; as decisive proofs of their profound and scrupulous reverence for the sacred obligation of an oath."

Now, let us advert to the argument which, more than all the rest, imposed on the Legislature. The Papist continually appealed to his refusal of the oaths required by the Test and Corporation Acts, and from this argued his fidelity to oaths of all kinds. Now, the Test and Corporation Acts demanded not the Papist's oath that he would abtain from doing any injury to Protestantism, but that he abjured the fundamental doctrines of Popery; in other words, demanded that, before he could be admitted to public office, he should prove that he was not a Papist, and this was done by abjuring the Pope's supremacy and the doctrine of transubstantiation, and receiving the holy sacrament in the manner of the Protestant Church, to confirm the fact of his being a Protestant. This was notoriously an oath which would bring down the censures of the Romish Church on him, and which, therefore, no Roman Catholic, however careless of oaths to the safety of Protestantism, could dare to take. So that the Papist actually has the effrontery to expect that, on the mere strength of his oath to the Romish Church (which he dares not violate

without terror of her censure and eternal ruin), we are to rely on his oath to Protestantism, which he must violate, if he is true to his own Church, and which that Church fully allows him to violate. The rule being, that "no oath contrary to the interests of the Church of Rome is binding."

To proceed. The petitioners declare, that they pledge themselves to disclose, denounce, and put down all conspiracies and treasons, which may be found against the king and his suc cessors, und further remind the Legislature," that they have solemnly sworn that they will not exercise any privilege to which they are or may become entitled, to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or Protestant Government in Ireland." And this part of their bond they keep, as we see, in the daily record of murderings and burnings, and the utter refusal, by the open authority of their bishops and leaders, of paying any part of the revenue due to the Clergy; the outery for the total extinction of the Church property! And this is the way in which Papists boast of keeping oaths! The petitioners, " to make assurance double sure," in fact, to dupe the Legislature still more thoroughly, added this declaration :

"Your petitioners most explicitly declare that they do not seek or wish, in the remotest degree, to injure or encroach upon the rights, privileges, immunities, possessions, or revenues appertaining to the bishops and clergy of the Protestant religion as by law established, or to the churches committed to their charge, or to any of them, the sole object of your petitioners being an equal participation, upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects, of the full benefits of the British constitution." Need we go further than this, or ask a deeper and more contemptuous condemnation of this atrocious system of falsehood, than to compare what the Papists are every where doing at this moment in the British empire, with what they have been swearing these fifty years?

But they never want a subterfuge. They tell us that their foreign universities have abjured the doctrines of murdering kings whom the Pope has excommunicated, and of not keeping faith with any whom they call heretics. But what are the declarations of their universities worth? Not the