a gun or a pistol would not have been found to murder Major Mahon or Mr. Lloyd, as there had been found to murder Lord Norbury and Mr. Brooke; but we must assert that such crimes have been facilitated, and therefore encouraged, by the conduct of the present Government-of which, as a warning for the future, it is necessary to recapitulate some particulars, which we cannot do more concisely than by reproducing some sentences from our Number for December, 1846. After noticing Lord John Russell's initiatory' jockeyship' on the potato scarcity,' we said:

His next step was a factious combination to expel Sir Robert Peel from power by defeating the Irish Coercion Bill. The Conservatives, who reluctantly joined in that vote, had the apology of doing so to displace a minister in whom they had no longer any confidence; but Lord John had no such plea, and though we admit that his party, when out of power, had opposed coercion bills, they had always, when in power, introduced and carried them, and sometimes with much more stringent provisions than the Tories would have ventured to propose. This was bad enough, but not so bad as when, finding, on his accession to office, the necessity of continuing the Arins Bill, he announced his intention to that effect, but within a few days, at the beck of his Irish Frankenstein, pusillanimously abandoned it, and left Ireland, for the first time for above a century, without that indispensable protection-a protection which every administration since the Union, Whig as well as Tory-nay, Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston themselves, had all successively maintained. The shame and mortification that Lord John Russell must feel when he comes to implore parliament to re-enact those laws which he so lately and so rashly rejected and repealed, will be but a very inadequate punishment for the strange combination of weakness and temerity which he exhibited at the close of the session.'-Q. R. No. clvii., pp. 241, 242.

That shame and mortification he has been forced to undergo. But there were circumstances connected with the abandonment of the Arms Bill still more to be deplored :

"The concession to which it was annexed had been extorted, it is scarcely necessary to say, by the demands of the Repeal party. With his usual prudence, Mr. O'Connell took care that this should be no secret, "requesting," in Conciliation Hall, in Dublin, on the same day on which Lord John Russell uttered his retractation in Parliamentthat same memorable seventeenth of August—" that a petition on the subject of the Arms Bill, containing 50,000 signatures, should not be forwarded, because HE had that morning received intelligence that the Government, in compliance with the wishes of the IRISH PEOPLE, had WITHDRAWN THAT MEAsure. -Ib., p. 260.

Conscious and ashamed of this ignominious desertion of their own measure, they had recourse to a kind of blustering apology, which, as usual, only made the matter worse-infinitely worse. The Secretary for Ireland (Mr. Labouchere) was directed to write a' Circular'

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIII.

T

a Circular' to the Irish magistrates, and through them to the Irish people, announcing what Mr. O'Connell's more potent voice had already thundered throughout Ireland, but which had a much more serious and effective meaning when issued by the chief organ of the Government as a great constitutional maxim, now for the first time promulgated to peaceful and loyal Ireland, namely the RIGHT of carrying arms for lawful purposes that EVERY IRISHMAN NOW POSSESSES.' This stupid commonplace was received by the populace with transports of savage joy -nothing damped by the sneaking salvo about lawful purposes,' when the lawfulness was to be judged by the party himself or his priest. What followed? We shall not quote the details of the immediate general arming of the peasantry, which we gave in the same article; but we must again copy from its the adverpages tisement of a vender of arms in a country town, bearing as its motto an extract of Mr. Labouchere's letter:

C TO THE PUBLIC.

The right of carrying arms for lawful objects, which every Irishman now possesses.-Chief Secretary's Letter.

'Peter Flanagan, locksmith and gunmaker, grateful for past favours, begs leave to inform his friends and the public in general, that he has just received his winter assortment of fire-arms from Birmingham direct, which he is enabled to dispose of on the most moderate terms.

'N.B.-Guns, pistols, and all kinds of arms repaired.'

After citing that advertisement we asked (Ibid., p. 258)'What is to be the end of this? What the end of it is to be, we are as far as ever from seeing; but its intermediate consequences may be traced, we are told, in the bold scowl of the armed pauper, whose gun, cheap as it was, is worth more than all the clothes on his person and all the furniture in his cottage. The assassinations within one month of Mr. Roe, Mr. Bayley, Major Mahon, and Mr. Lloyd, are a frightful illustration of the truth of our own predictions in December, 1846, as well as of the following picture, very recently drawn in a private letter to a friend in England from an Irish gentleman, of liberal but moderate politics, on whose veracity and impartiality our readers may most confidently rely:

'No sooner had Sir R. Peel's Arms Act-itself a very imperfect and inefficient one-been suffered to expire, and Mr. Labouchere had promulgated his doctrine of the right of every man to carry arms, than there was scarcely a market or fair in Ireland where arms were not sold by auction. I am assured by a person intimately acquainted with the locality, that in the immediate neighbourhood of *** [a small village in one of the quietest districts in Ireland] there are not less than 1000 stand of arms in the hands of men who are in want of daily food. You cannot have failed to observe with what deadly aim the shot of the assassin was directed in

the

the more recent murders. This is the result of the dexterity acquired by the open and uninterrupted use of fire-arms. Formerly the assassin had to bring his gun from a place of concealment, where it was likely to have got out of order-the lock rusty, the trigger stiff, the powder damp, the whole apparatus in some way or other imperfect, and its owner but indifferently practised in the use of it; but now, in general, the guns and pistols in the hands of the assassin are detonators, and, by open and continual practice, he has become as handy in the use of them as any one of her Majesty's Rifles. It happened to me one Sunday this autumn to be obliged, very contrary to my habit, to travel to a parish a considerable distance from my own, where there are a chain of small lakes at no great distance from the high road. Around these I observed, what on former visits I had never seen, several groups of armed peasants firing at water-fowl, or at what seemed rather to be floating targetsa question about which, however, I did not think it prudent to be too inquisitive; but I am informed (and it certainly is the case hereabouts) that the Roman Catholic peasantry all over Ireland employ their holidays and Sundays in gun and pistol practice. The first and most urgent measure of public safety that the Government should take would be to undo all that they have done, and particularly to take the arms out of the hands of the peasant, and obliterate, if possible, Mr. Labouchere's commentary on the right of carrying arms by men in whose hands they never possibly can be for any lawful purpose.'

We the rather produce this evidence, because it refers to a district which has hitherto been tranquil, and shows that the following statement as to Tipperary, made by Sir George Grey in the speech introducing his Coercion Bill, is equally applicable to other less notorious districts:

'It was stated in one of the letters, that in former times, when shots were heard, the attention of the police was attracted-they turned out immediately, and they thus had a chance of arresting the offender; but at present, owing to the indiscriminate possession of fire-arms in the disturbed districts, shots were fired all day and all night; and, therefore, the fact of a shot being fired in the hearing of the soldiers in the cavalry barracks or the police in their stations raised no suspicion that a murder had been committed. In the document he was about to quote, the police stated that in the limited district to which they were confined, and where a murder had been just committed, they had counted no less than 40 shots immediately afterwards, as if fired out of bravado, or with a view of the murderers expressing their satisfaction at the accomplishment of the deed, or possibly with a view of distracting and diverting the attention of the police. On this fact Mr. Serjeant Howley [a Roman Catholic Magistrate, and Chairman of the Sessions] remarked:-" When I was lately in Tipperary, passing along the high road between Clonmel and Caher, at one o'clock in the day, that day Sunday, I observed a person, accompanied by two others, present a large horse-pistol across the road, and fire. He then passed across the road to see the effect of his shot, and was reloading for another trial just as I drove up opposite

to where he stood. I must say he obligingly allowed me to pass before he renewed his practice. Every half-hour shots may be heard in the fields, on the roads, in the streets of the towns, in the suburbs, and this by day and by night. Formerly, when the report of a gun was heard, it at once attracted the attention of the police, and was some warning, if at an unseasonable hour, that some act of violence or outrage was being committed. But the noise of fire-arms no longer gives any notice, or, at least, operates as such. The police would be constantly running backward and forward if they attended to every report of arms."'—Debates, 29th Nov.

And this statement was made-without any reported apology or palinode-by the Secretary of State, standing between the Minister who had abandoned the Arms Bill and his other colleague who had lectured on the right to carry arms, and which lecture, though delivered by Mr. Labouchere, was no doubt (at least ought to have been) previously sanctioned by Sir George Grey himself!

The Conservative Opposition seems to have been so reluctant to embarrass the measures of Government, that this self-condemnation was suffered to pass without remark, though it could not escape notice that the remedy proposed by Sir George Grey's bill seemed very inadequate to the evils detailed in his speech; and accordingly we were not surprised to find Mr. John O'Connell declaring that

'he was agreeably disappointed; for he had been, from what he had heard out of doors, prepared for a more severe measure.'

Mr. M. O'Connell was satisfied,

'finding the measure trenched so little on the Constitution.'

Mr. D. Callaghan was

'glad to be able to return to Ireland and assure the people that they were not to be afflicted with any measure of severity.'

This wonderful unanimity, however, was soon interrupted. We have no doubt that the Ministry had lowered their measure as far as they could-in order to conciliate their Irish supporters, and the Irish supporters in return were willing to help their friends, the Ministers, with as much support as they could venture to give -and therefore adopted the line of extenuating the efficacy of the measure; but an independent Irishman-the member for Nottingham, Mr. Feargus O'Connor-having manfully taken up the old line of opposition to any and every Coercion Bill, Mr. John O'Connell seemed to become alarmed at this rival for Irish popularity, and made a short wheel into a direct and somewhat vexatious opposition to the bill. He, the same Mr. J. O'Connell who had received such agreeable' impressions from Sir George Grey's speech on the introduction of the bill, heard his proposition for the second reading

'with bitterness. He felt that it was now the duty of those who took an interest in the welfare of Ireland to proclaim to her people that as the policy of England towards Ireland had hitherto been that of hate and oppression, so it would continue to the end of the chapter, and that they must now sit down and give themselves up to utter despair. It was hopeless for Irish members to expect to be listened to by that house with attention. No terms were, of course, to be kept with Ireland. It was a habit of that house, a custom of the English mind, to treat Ireland with disregard; and the right honourable Baronet might push the measure as fast as he chose. Irish members had no means of resistance in their power, nor had they any opportunity of redress. The Government had trampled on every sentiment of decency and consistency in their conduct as respected it. Was that the way'- &c. &c.

And the same Mr. Dan Callaghan, who was so glad' at the first appearance of the bill, was now decidedly opposed to it; and -which must have been infinitely droll to have witnessed--he vehemently rated Mr. Joseph Hume, who supported the bill, for inconsistency!

Such absurdities may seem unworthy our notice-but not so, if, showing the spirit of those who assume to speak the sentiments of the Irish priests and people, they should contribute to open the eyes of the Government to the great truth, that they never ought to expect, and assuredly never will receive, from those quarters any real effective bonâ fide support towards the establishing the supremacy of the law-as law-in Ireland; nor indeed towards the recognition of any other authority but that of the Roman Catholic priesthood. When we read in these debates such eternal eulogies on the merit of that priesthood in maintaining peace and order, they seem to us rather like derision and irony; at all events, they are liable to a most embarrassing replicationif there be a power that can produce peace and order, what excuse can be made for it when it permits rebellion and murder? We have no means of ascertaining the proportion of the agitating priests to those who are of a more peaceable and Christian-like character; -but if this praise were as generally deserved as indiscriminately bestowed, the fact would only corroborate our argument:-the peace and order of a country-the security of life and propertyshould be due, not to the Priest, but to the Law; and until the law shall stand on its own strength, independent of and paramount to the Priest, there can be no real and permanent tranquillity in Ireland. We are not however without expectation that the Bill, as it has been passed, will produce immediate good effects. In the first place, it may induce the Priests to release each his own district from its operation, by commanding a temporary tranquillity for so unbounded is their authority, that they can even preserve quiet. It gives, secondly, an effective-though not a sufficiently extensive-power of seizing arms. It also contains a clause