commerce was crippled, but that the national honour was stained, and national impotence proclaimed, by these blockades being allowed to be established at all.

Very different was the state of Ireland. There, political and religious party spirit assumed a form which produced some unexpected occurrences, and threatened, in the apprehensions of the timid, the utter dissolution of society. The Catholic Association had continued to meet and to operate, notwithstanding the statute which had been designed to suppress it. That law had been intended to abolish impartially all the angry and noisy convocations of both parties, the Orange Societies as well as the Catholic Association. The former had submitted to the voice of the legislature: the latter changed its form, but changed nothing of its activity, its violence, and abuse. The Catholic leader had boasted from the beginning that no act of parliament would be able to restrain them, and he had carried his boast into effect. The task was an easy one; for no attempt was made to put the law in execution. The government, which had called for it as being indispensable to the peace of Ireland, made no use of it, while the peace of Ireland was vanishing before their eyes; and by doing so, they deprived themselves, in a great measure, of all right to complain that the proper government of Ireland was a thing beyond their power. During the short period that Mr. Canning was minister, the Catholics had been comparatively tranquil. Although his cabinet was divided on the question of their admission to political power, they rightly placed great confidence in the circumstance that he himself was their

friend; if he should remain in power, it was more than probable that their object would be gained; and, therefore, their most tried friends in parliament had both declined pressing Mr. Canning to give any determinate pledge upon the subject, and had abstained from all motions and discussions which might have embarrassed or shaken him in his tottering position. When lord Goderich became minister, their confidence waxed weaker; for though the head of the ministry was still their friend, he was a friend whose influence with the public and in the government was infinitely less. When he retired from office, and was succeeded by the duke of Wellington, they did not merely lose all hope of ministerial assistance, but they regarded the new arrangement of the cabinet as a new obstacle reared up against their progress. True, their exclusion had not been made a cabinet question; the ministry had not been organized on the principle that emancipation ought never to be granted; and Mr. Peel had already declared in parliament that it would not be possible to frame on that principle, a ministry sufficiently strong to govern the country. But still the head of the ministry was now their enemy, instead of being their friend; and it was a powerful and energetic head instead of being a weak one. Many of their supporters still continued in office, but they had lost the marquis of Lansdowne, and in his place had come Mr. Peel, the most immoveable and determined, as far as men could judge from his whole public life, and his repeated parliamentary declarations, of all their adversaries

the representative of the embodied resistance of the Church

of England. The power of the ministry resided in the duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel; the duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel, from their first entrance into public life, had been the opponents of Catholic emancipation; and in them the Protestants of the empire trusted, with a confidence which knew no bounds, that Catholics should never, with their consent, be admitted to the enjoyment of political power.

From the instant, therefore, that the new ministry was formed, the Catholic Association had waged war against the duke of Wellington and his ministry. Its orators lavished their contumely and abuse *upon his grace without either taste or discretion; so far as their words could go, they revolted all sound sense and good feeling. But their doings were things of much higher importance, and were carried through with an activity and perseverance which led to very alarming results. The general election had taught them to what an extent they could control the votes of the freeholders in the county elections. The efforts, which they made on that occasion, had not been preceded by any uncommon degree of preparation, and yet their success had been conspicuous. The same instruments promised still more important triumphs, when they should be more systematically employed. The fate of every county election in Ireland depended on the rabble of forty-shilling freeholders, men generally ignorant and poor, hitherto the mere creatures of the landlords on whose property they vegetated, easily inflamed by imagined wrongs and tales of fancied oppression, incapable of all sound or independent political sentiment, the slaves of a

religion which rules ignorance more despotically than does any other, and which, again, uses ignorance itself as one mighty instrument of its sway. The Association determined to make itself master of the voices of these men, and, thus obtaining the command of the county elections, to overthrow the ministry, or any ministry which should refuse to grant unconditional emancipation, by returning members pledged to oppose every measure of every cabinet which would not adopt and carry through this one measure. They had their itinerant orators to inflame the angry passions and ignorant prejudices of the rabble; what was of much higher consequence, they had the united body of the popish priesthood to work upon their consciences. They could deprive the contest of all the characters of a merely political struggle, which still leaves some room for the exercise of the understanding, and invest it with the character of a religious warfare, which, in an ignorant and superstitious mob, lays every thing at the feet of blind, unthinking, and reckless bigotry. It was very true that the success of the scheme implied a breaking-up of the usual relations of society; the proprietors of the soil must be stripped of the influence which the possession of property ought always to bestow, and which, in every well-conditioned society it always bestow. But of this confusion the Catholic Association boasted. This disrupture of ordinary ties, this dislocation of the members of society, was the very effect which it announced its intention of producing. Its orators publicly proclaimed that "Agitation," as they termed it, was the object which

does

nion could not fail to be received as unquestionable law by a rabble to whose passions it was favourable, and amongst whom he was, on other accounts, eminently popular. The unthinking multitude, for whom such assertions were intended, never considered, that, if Mr. O'Connell could really sit in parliament for the county of Clare, without taking the oaths which denounced their Church as idolatrous and acknowledged the supremacy of the king, then it necessarily followed that he and they had always possessed the very right for which they were now contending, and which was to be secured even by the sacrifice of all civil concord.

From the moment that his intention of opposing Mr. Fitzgerald was announced, the county of Clare was traversed in every direction by the orators of the Association, and the popish parish priests. With unwearied activity they hurried from parish to parish, assembling and haranguing the squalid elect ors. The places, which they chose for their convocations, were the popish chapels, partly from convenience, and partly to aid the religious character which their mission instantly assumed. As Mr. Shiel, one of their most flowery rhetoricians, afterwards said, "every altar became a tribune." Wherever a priest and an agitator arrived, the populace were instantly assembled, even at the dead hour of night. Surrounded by the symbols of their religion, they were called upon by the infallible voice of its teachers, to rise in defence of its honour and its rights. Their opponents were represented to them as objects of horror and detestation. All protestants, who thought that protestantism would be endangered by giving Catholics the power to in

jure it, were represented, not as men who entertained selfish and erroneous opinions which ought to be opposed, but as brutal and aban doned miscreants who were to be crushed and hated. The great majority of the population of the United Kingdom were never spoken of but as persecutors ravenous for Catholic blood, and labouring, by the perpetration of systematic atrocities, to effect the degradation and destruction of the Catholic Church. The peasantry were told, that to support any supporter of the administration was to lay themselves at the mercy of here tical murderers; whilst the triumph of their popular leader would shower down upon their cabins, by some unexplained process, a hap piness and abundance which fled from before the face of a Protestant representative. The excite ment, so easily raised in willing minds by furious tirades about personal slavery and national degra dation, was maddened beyond control by the dread of everlasting punishment. The priest completed what the politician had be gun. His flock heard from his lips, that, in voting against Daniel O'Connell, they would be voting against their God and their faith, strengthening the hands of her etics, perpetuating the oppression of their own holy Church, and therefore exposing themselves de servedly to all its power of punish-E ing both here and hereafter. On the one hand were presented to them the slavery of their country under Protestant tyrants, the pro faning of their temples by Protest ant insult, the outraging of their persons by Protestant blood-thirstiness and Protestant lust, and the pains of hell-fire as the reward of 1 having chosen a Protestant candi

1