10 Irish Parliaments, and ^JuLY, 



given; the crimes of nations are long endured; but the crimes of 

 legislatures are always punished. There seems to be a deep, and direct 

 insult to the God of Justice, in the offence of those great bodies from 

 which justice and lionour should flow, as from fountains, to invigorate 

 national principle. How soon did all the legislatures of Italy, Spain, 

 and Germany perish, after they had become thoroughly venal ! How 

 soon was the notorious corruption of the old French legislature pvmished, 

 by extinction ! But if the Irish parliament had never received a polluted 

 shilling, the conduct of its electors and elections from 1793, must have 

 called down vengeance. In the whole history of perjury, there never 

 was so scandalous and repulsive a mass of perjury, as was thus perpetually 

 added to the national guilt of Ireland. In the first instance, almost the 

 whole body of the papist freeholders were perjured. The evidence of 

 this atrocity is abundant, but we shall restrict ourselves to one or two indi- 

 viduals, known as popish advocates. Mr. Blake, a Roman Catholic barris- 

 ter, and Remembrancer of the Exchequer Court in Ireland, (Com. of 

 House of Commons, 1825, p. 43.) says, " The common mode of creating 

 forty-shilling freeholders is this : the tenants, (holding leases for life) in 

 general pay what is called a rackrent for the land ; tliey tlien build mud 

 huts upon it, and if they make out of the land a profit of forty shillings, a 

 profit produced by the sweet of their brow, this is considered by them 

 as an interest in the land to the extent of forty shillings a year : whereas 

 this gain produced, is not through an interest in the land, but through 

 their labour." 



Mr. Browne, Memlier for IMayo, (Cora, of Lords, 1824, p. 10.) thus 

 detailed the manufacture of perjury. " Supposing a farm of 100 acres 

 is to be let, that land would probably be divided into from twenty to 

 twenty-five holdings. The landlord would let it to those people at a 

 greater price than the grazier could afford to pay him, in consequence of 

 their security being inferior ; these persons would, immediately on taking 

 out their leases, commence enclosing a garden, or building a hou^e, or 

 rather a hut, and would, perhaps within the same week, or frequently be- 

 fore the ink was dry of the signatures of their leases, register upon a forty- 

 shilling freehold out of the land, for which they pay a rackrent." From 

 this plan issued an enormous and perpetually repeated system of false 

 swearing ; for those mock freeholds must be registered : to be registered, 

 their value must be sworn to ; and the freehold, not worth forty pence, was 

 regularly declared on the scriptures to be of the legal value. A specimen 

 of the operation of this system upon the populace, may be found in the tes- 

 timony of Dr. Kelly, titular Archbishop of Tuam. " The freeholders have 

 often called on me to represent their unfortunate condition, and stated, that 

 the quantity of land which they held was very small — that they were 

 very apprehensive about taking the oath of forty-shiUing freeholders, 

 and they requested me to advise them what to do upon the occasion. 

 My advice uniformly was, for no person to register as a freeholder, 

 unless he could do it with safety to his own conscience. I have met 

 them afterwards, and they acknowledge, that although they did not feel 

 their consciences quite at ease, they were obliged to register their free- 

 holds. That they had been threatened to be expelled from their hold- 

 ings, or to be deprived of their land, unless they registered their free- 

 holds ! 



Such was the forty shilling freehold system— the creation of the pre- 

 tended patriots of Ireland in the year 1793, and applauded and sustained 



