246 Irish Polemics. [ MARCH, 



and triumphantly narrated, to the prejudice of the moral and intellectual 

 character of the population. The parties interested, and for whose souls this 

 tender anxiety is avowed, not unnaturally think that they have a right to be 

 present at such discussions, notwithstanding any formal technicalities in the 

 requisitions, adopted for the purpose of excluding them. " Nostra res 

 agitur," they exclaim; '* and we have a right to be heard." In some 

 instances, accordingly, they have forced themselves into the meetings, and 

 have replied to the speakers. At Balinasloe, more especially, Mr. Eneas 

 Mac Donnell, if not ' le plus grand diseur de rien qui aitjamais ete^ 

 at least the " deadest hand " at a seven hours' speech, so completely ex- 

 hausted the patience and the temper of his auditory, that the secular power 

 was called in, in order that the whole Catholic portion of the assembly 

 might be turned out at the point of the bayonet. This outrageous appeal 

 to 



" The holy text of pike and gun," 



gave very little satisfaction, and more particularly to those individuals who 

 had been beaten and cut in the process. An immense explosion of popular 

 feeling followed, and a formal complaint of the illegality of the outrage 

 was forwarded to the Irish government. The official reply was a reference 

 to the courts of law. To understand the full value of this reply, we must 

 be intimately acquainted with the sort of redress which the Irish law 

 courts too often afford in such cases. We must understand, not only the 

 expense common to all procedures in all the courts of this happy empire, 

 but the difficulty of obtaining honest juries, and the certainty of finding 

 witnesses prepared to swear any thing and every thing that suits the in- 

 terest of their party. It is the curse of religious dissension that it demo- 

 ralizes its victims. The most upright judge in Ireland would be unable to 

 contend with party intrigue, if the cause were only supported by a private 

 purse. Such an appeal to the laws would, in the opinion of most Irish- 

 men, be wholly nugatory, and the reference was, the addition of insult to 

 injury. How the Orange party in the administration for to them it must 

 be attributed "can reconcile it to their conscience thus to trifle with the 

 public peace, and leave so scandalous a scene unsifted and unexplained, 

 they best can tell. To common apprehension, the crown lawyers receive 

 their salaries for this, among other purposes that they should interfere 

 to protect those who are too poor and friendless to help themselves, in cases 

 of public injury; and to watch that, as far as law is concerned, ne quid 

 detriments res pub lie a capiat. 



Every-day scenes of this nature sometimes sanguinary, sometimes only 

 ludicrous occur. At the moment at which I write, a spiritual tourna- 

 ment is in preparation, between six sable combatants of the Catholic church, 

 and as many knights of the woeful countenance, friends of the reformation 

 to be fought a I'outrance, at Derry the one party protected by the 

 " simple rondash" of the Bible the other, "armed at all points*' in the 

 panoply of the fathers. If humanity did not bleed for the follies of men, 

 nothing could be more truly comic than these displays of that "too much 

 learning" which makes folks mad. The dull, sombre, demure counte- 

 nance of the disputants, gradually kindling by mutual attrition the flash 

 of triumph, shot from beneath the lanky dark locks of the atribilious sec- 

 tarian the rising and falling of hope in the anxious faces of the simple 

 auditory, as blows are given or parried the frantic zeal, the sleek self- 

 complacency, the honest good faith with which both parties misquote, 



