10 The Catholics of Ireland. [ jAtf. 



gained. Something, too, on the possibility and this might very fairly 

 lead to a fresh dispute on the possibility of taking, by special pleading, 

 a little more than had really been conceded. A great quantity of argu- 

 ment would still be marketable purely because so much had been 

 granted in disputing for the remainder which was still denied. And 

 the division of the " loaves and fishes " the complaint that, after right 

 to office was admitted, appointment to it was withheld that some Pro- 

 testant was made attorney general, when the post ought to have been 

 given to a Catholic or that some Catholic was raised to the dignity of 

 constable, merely because he neglected his religious duties, and had been 

 three Sundays together absent from mass these would be grievances, 

 not only to go on in discussion incessantly for many years, but such as 

 something might be said from time to time upon, absolutely to eternity. 



The evils too, unhappily, under which Ireland labours, are too many 

 and too real to be cured, as by a charm, by the passing of any single 

 bill through the English Houses of Parliament. We have never looked 

 at " Emancipation " as at a question which, in that country, would 

 merely affect the few : but its success this hour would not, in one mo- 

 ment, give peacefulness and education to the lower classes of the Irish 

 temperance and charity to the few resident gentry or a disposition to 

 live among those by whom they live, to the wealthy absentees. A soil, 

 which its owners have abandoned to mercenary strangers to rack and 

 make their profit of upon which not even any stranger will live, who 

 has a competence to live any where else. A population so dense and 

 crowded, as to be lowering the market for labour to ruin upon each 

 other : desperate from having no evil scarcely even death as an evil 

 to fear; and lawless, even from that very perfect destitution, which 

 leaves them nothing to hope for, nothing to protect. A disregard, com- 

 mon to all ranks, of neatness, decency, and of that peculiar quality 

 which, in England, we call " comfort." Crimes of a nature the most 

 savage and ferocious ; a constant trust in falsehood, and in some jobbing, 

 crooked policy ; and an almost insane propensity about the whole people 



their wants absolutely apart to acts of violence and fury. These 



causes of ill relieved by some few bright qualities (but scarcely useful) 

 the virtues of a barbarous age are the great features which present 

 themselves to a stranger in his first view of the state of Ireland : and 

 these are not calamities which the removal of Catholic restrictions 

 (alone) can cure. 



The mistake of the argument, however, here as upon too many other 

 subjects seems to us to be the pressing always for immediate and 

 extreme results. If we can do little, by any single measure, for the 

 relief of Ireland in the present, a time must come, at which we shall 

 have to lay a groundwork for improvement to that country in the future. 

 Admit the statement, that the Catholic restrictions do not, " in fact," 

 touch one in five thousand of the Irish population ; yet, do we not know 

 that, " in fact," it is not for " fact" alone for reality and for something 

 which may be " had and received " that men cut one another's throats 

 by thousands ? How many more than the " one in five thousand," in 

 any society, are really affected by their admissibility, or non-admissibility, 

 to posts of power and distinction ? and yet, who would venture to pro- 

 pose an Act of Parliament in England, by which the meanest mechanic 

 was to be shut out from his right of competing for that power and dis- 

 tinction ? The first step begin when we will taken towards improving 



