]2(J Europe at the Commencement of the Year 1831. [[FEB. 



flections of men driven out of power by national scorn. But, for this 

 blunder, if to them it were a blunder, we are paying severely now ; 

 and well may we execrate the " Measure," which has caused a state of 

 Ireland, unexampled in the history even of Irish turbulence, and which 

 will speedily, unless changed by some interposition little short of miracu- 

 lous, cover the land with civil blood. 



Yet in the midst of all this regret, it is scarcely possible to suppress a 

 bitter and contemptuous joy at the recompence which the crowd of Irish 

 Protestant abettors of the party are undergoing clay by day. We now 

 see the popularity-hunters trembling at the work of their own hands, 

 attempting to put down by their silly signatures the fierce spirit which 

 they raised by their own miserable partizanship, and scoffed at for the 

 attempt. We see the whole tribe turned into cyphers. The Viceroy 

 received in silence, or in sneers, by the mob, to " conciliate" whose 

 huzzas this personage stooped to the flattery of the populace ; and we 

 see him treated with the most insolent defiance by the leader of that 

 populace. We well remember his letter to Dr. Curtis, telling the papists 

 to " agitate, agitate, agitate ;" and we contemptuously exult that the in- 

 dividual who dared to utter this advice, is now compelled to witness the 

 result of this "agitation." But, enough of such triflers. A sterner 

 time is coming. To repel the? storm is now all but impossible, at all 

 events it will never be repelled by weak counsels, nor feeble instruments. 

 The fate of kingdoms is not to be averted by such means as reside in the 

 hearts and heads of the present administrators of Ireland. 



Their arrest of O'Connell betrays the tardiness of their sense of their 

 situation. They have not ventured to seize the disturber on the ground 

 which would be intelligible to all men, that of conspiring to rouse the 

 populace against the'" Incorporation" of England and Ireland, a portion 

 of the Constitution as distinctly declared by law to be irrevocable, as the 

 establishment of a house of peers, or the throne. But they have 

 dwindled down the charge into a legal subtlety, which will be sure to 

 sink under them before a jury ; and the defeat of this frivolous attempt 

 will only inspirit the disturbance, and place the disturber beyond all 

 control. " Evading a proclamation !" what is this, but what O'Connell 

 has declared it to be, " giving no opportunity for the proclamation to seize 

 on him ?" The very words imply that he has not come within the grasp 

 of the proclamation ; and he is now to be seized, in virtue of that pro- 

 hibition which he is acknowledged not to have violated. But the error 

 lies even deeper. By making O'Connell's crime to be against a procla- 

 mation of a Viceroy, and not against the Constitution of the Empire, it 

 makes the charge degenerate at once into a squabble with an official, 

 whose own w r ords are on record, advising " agitation." It opposes 

 O'Connell, not to the majesty of British justice and the established rights 

 of the empire, but to a viceroy who scribbled an actual exhortation to 

 the populace to " agitate ;" and to a secretary whose parliamentary 

 harangues were directed against the spirit of the acts which he is now 

 promulgating with his pen. To the principles of the governors, let them 

 throw in the principles of Lord Plunkett, and we shall see how the scale 

 will vibrate. But the contest will be one of mere person. The crime 

 against the Constitution will be merged in the contest with the indi- 

 vidual ; it will be altogether an affair of character ; and no man will care 

 a straw how it is decided. But this state of things cannot last; popular 

 fury will not be calmed by thq flimsy contrivances of lawyers. The 



