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AGRARIAN OUTRAGES.

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with is clearly indicated by a report subsequently made by the Lord Lieutenant, in which he said that the offences committed against the public peace in the disturbed counties all partook of the same general character, for reports were constantly received of attacks on dwellinghouses for the purpose of procuring arms; and the frequency of these attacks, and the open and daring manner in which they were made, were sufficient proofs of the desire which generally prevailed amongs those concerned in the disturbances to collect large quantities of arms, and thus possess the means of prosecuting their ulterior objects with a better prospect of success. Several instances occurred in which the houses of respectable individuals were attacked, even in the open day, by large bodies of armed men and others, in which the military, acting under the orders of the magistrates, met with considerable resistance. The Lord Lieutenant expressly says, "It is worthy of remark that in the several successful attacks which were made upon houses with the view of depriving the proprietors of their arms, it rarely occurred that any other species of property was molested." This appears to be what Mr. Peel called the romantic side of the subject. The Lord Lieutenant goes on to say that "the principal objects of hostility, or rather the principal sufferers, on account of their inadequate means of defence, were those persons who, on the expiration of leases, had taken small farms at a higher rent than that which they had previously paid, or than which the late occupiers had offered; and all those who were suspected of a disposition to give information to magistrates against the disturbers of the peace, or to bear testimony against them in a court of justice in the event of their apprehension and trial. From the general terror which these proceedings excited, it became almost impossible to procure satisfactory evidence against the guilty, and it not unfrequently happened that the sufferers from these atrocities, when visited by a magistrate, would only depose generally to the fact of their having been perpetrated, not denying their knowledge of the offenders, but steadily refusing to disclose their names or to describe their appearance, from a rational apprehension of future additional injury to themselves, their families, or their friends. And even when

the parties deposed against were apprehended, there was often the greatest difficulty to accomplish their conviction, from the intimidation of witnesses, and in some cases even of jurors." All these passages are exactly parallel with others relating to Irish events in 1880. Since they were thus officially recorded in 1814, innumerable Acts have been passed and repassed for the suppression of such outrages; but, if the records of 1880 are correctly published, all the Acts put together during the interval of sixty-six years have not effected the slightest change in the tendency, character, and persistency of the outrages described. It is a long, monotonous history of official and legislative impotence, in irrefragable evidence of the utter and humiliating failure of the Union Parliament to do what that Parliament originally set out to do. So much for coercion in the long run: we shall see presently what the immediate effects were of the coercion of 1814.

Agrarian outrages eclipsed Catholic grievances, and in their turn both were forgotten during the hundred days that ended at Waterloo, and for some time afterwards. Before the startling events of those memorable days had ceased to be fresh and vivid, Ireland and the Irish demanded attention again.

In defiance of the Coercion Act of 1814, we find that early in 1815 houses were frequently plundered of the arms contained in them by disorderly persons who came from parts of the country far remote from the places where the offences were committed, and that they were mounted on horses seized from the owners for the occasion. The combined efforts of the magistracy and the police, aided as they were by a considerable military force, were insufficient to overcome the lawless spirit of audacity which placed lives and property in continual hazard. No less than four attacks were made within a short period by large bodies of men upon the coaches conveying the mails through the country, notwithstanding that they had the advantage of a military escort; and on some of these occasions several of the dragoons were killed and other persons were wounded. In Kilnemanagh a house hired as a temporary barrack for the military, with the house adjoining, was entirely destroyed in September by a very large body of armed.

MURDER OF A MAGISTRATE.

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men, who were provided with all the necessary instruments for a successful attack, and a written notice was left that it was resolved to destroy in the same manner any house that might be taken by the government for such a purpose. The weekly reports made to the government by the magistrates superintending the police force mentioned repeated instances in which houses had been attacked, some in the daytime, when the occupants were obliged to deliver up their arms. Several murders were committed, the victims selected being generally the persons engaged in the valuation or collection of tithes. One of these was a person who, though accompanied by eight armed men for his protection, was slain in open daylight, and his party was disarmed, although they were at the same time within a very short distance of Cashel. This was immediately after a large additional military force had been sent into that part of the country. The magistrates stated that the whole country was then in a state of serious disturbance, occasioned by a widely ramified confederacy.

Frantic efforts were made to stop the mischief. Arrests were effected after wholesale fashion, and many executions took place. There seemed to be a lull, and the magistrates of Limerick conveyed to the Lord Lieutenant their expressions of satisfaction at the result of vigorous coercion, when, almost before the document had arrived at Dublin, one of the magistrates who signed it, on his return from a magistrates meeting, was waylaid and shot dead in open daylight. It was believed from the circumstances of the murder, that it was devised by persons of superior order. The government offered a reward of five thousand hounds for the apprehension of the offenders, but not a vestige of evidence was ever procured. In November, outrages were especially rife in King's County, Westmeath, and Down. As many as eleven houses were attacked in one fierce raid by a large body of men in disguise, who plundered the houses of all the arms they contained. Clare also became notorious for outrages of a corresponding character. As the winter advanced, entire lawlessness prevailed in defiance of coercive powers incessant vigilance of the police, and the active aid of the military. Threatening notices were continually posted, forbidding persons to take

lands of which the previous tenants had been dispossessed, at a higher rent than had been formerly paid, or to pay any rents at all except under certain regulations that were popularly approved. These outrages continued in much the same way until the summer of 1816.

It is claimed by those who favour coercion that it did eventually restore a certain measure of peace after these determined disorders. No doubt the years immediately succeeding were not quite so bad, but the improvement is as attributable to sheer exhaustion of prolonged effort as to legal interference; for when the increase of outrage so often followed more than usually suppressive efforts, the deterring effect, at best, must have been very weak; and though the outrages did for a time cease to be so very numerous, they were quite frequent enough to be deeply deplored, and quoted in evidence of the helplessness of the

law.

THE

CHAPTER XVII.

PEEL'S POLICE.

HE outrages that prevailed during the Waterloo period, as just previously described, while evidencing the uselessness of coercion, or its very qualified success, are the more remarkable because those of 1815 were after Peel's police had been introduced.

It is almost universally known that we are indebted to the late Sir Robert Peel for the system of police that now prevails throughout the kingdom. The system found its initiation in Ireland. Sir Robert (then Mr.) Peel had been first elected to Parliament for Cashel in 1809, through the influence of his father, the first baronet. Being thus associated with Ireland from the beginning of his parliamentary career, it was an easy transition for him to be made Chief Secretary in 1812, when only about twenty-four years of age.

In that very responsible position he devised his first scheme of police expressly for Ireland, and the scheme was embodied in the original Police Act, brought in and passed by the influence of Mr. Peel on the 25th of July, 1814.

The preamble tells the same old, old story of almost every Act relating to unhappy Hibernia: "Whereas disturbances have from time to time existed in different parts of Ireland, for the suppression whereof the ordinary police hath been found insufficient." The Act empowers the Lord Lieutenant to proclaim any district where he has reason to believe there is an unusual state of disturbance, and where an extraordinary establishment of police is required. Whereupon he has also power to appoint a chief magistrate of police for each county, barony, or half barony, with all the powers of an ordinary justice of the peace, and with

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