1829. J The Forty Shilling Freeholders. 11 



to the last by the whole body of Papists and pretended patriots, until the 

 moment when they bargained it away for their own objects. Such was 

 the system which the " Agitator" declared that he would uphold 

 alike in " the field or on the scaffold." It was, in all its parts, infa- 

 mous ; it deserved to perish, and it deserved to work the ruin of its 

 abettors. Of its Protestant abettors, it has already worked the ruin. 

 Those hypocrites, who, with the most perfect consciousness that to serve 

 the cause of popery was to abandon the cause of the Constitution, yet 

 swelled the number of the pro-Papists, are actually already undergoing 

 their castigation, are losing the very object for which they sacrificed 

 protestantism, and already see themselves trampled down, and cast out 

 of their hereditary influence, by popery. 



INIr. O'ConneU's tour through the south of Ireland, is the first fruits of 

 the conciliation system. Nothing could be a stronger evidence of the fatu- 

 ity of Mr. Peel and his assessors, than the mere act of sending this man 

 back again to Ireland to recommence a canvass for his seat. Whatever 

 might have been his influence before, it is ten times augmented now. 

 He was treated with a harshness that throws the Cabinet on its justifi- 

 cation, and entitles it to lais bitterest hostility. His journey has been a 

 perpetual triumph ; and he has turned his triumph, whether by inten- 

 tion or accident, into a triumph of popish superstition. What are those 

 processions of priests, those visits to convents, the Avhole mummery of 

 his prostrations at the feet of friars, prayers in the streets, and harangues 

 in chapels ? WiU these things perish ? Not one of them. The seed 

 that is cast into the ground in this journey, will bear fifty-fold in its due 

 time. What are the open quarrels of the military on his account ? — whole 

 regiments taking up his cause, even to mutual bloodshed. Military men 

 of rank basely attending on the demagogue at his quarters, and paying 

 him the same deference that they could to legitimate authority. And is 

 all this for nothing, in the midst of a multitude of the most violent, and 

 giddy, superstitious, and sanguinary peasantry in Europe ; with the 

 whole protestant population, including the whole intelligence and 

 property of the country, utterly disgusted by the conduct of the British 

 cabinet, and with a priesthood on the other side, guiding, stimulating, 

 and maddening their own furious and ignorant populace to a seizure of 

 power at all risks .^ As to the representation of Ireland, the whole of it 

 must rapidly pass into papist hands. The priests have but to speak the 

 word, command their slaves to act, and the thing is done. But they keep 

 back their strength for the moment, for the double reason, that a too 

 sudden display might embarrass their official partizans here, and that they 

 cannot trust the barrister-tribe, who are now their chief agents ; they 

 know them to be utterly selfish, and they shrink from exerting their 

 anathemas, and pouring out their popish thunderbolts, only to secure 

 silk gowns for hirelings. They have a deeper purpose in view, and that 

 purpose is the supremacy of their superstition. They cannot trust a 

 coquetting lawyer with this purpose : they know that the love of gain is 

 so wrought into the soul of those men, that a seat on the bench, a 

 pension for a wife, or a sinecure for a son, Avould win them from their 

 highest flight of partizansiiip, and knowing this, they will not trust the 

 cause of Rome into such slippery hands. But they are training a new 

 generation. The Jesuit seminaries have been at work, silently, but suc- 

 cessfully ; a stern and subtle education has been for some years equip- 

 ping the rising race of Irish papists of the better order for the stoi miest and 



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