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fort, he is enabled to live on a much smaller expenditure, and so, saving a larger profit out of the proceeds of the farm, can outbid the Protestant. As the increase of rent, thus offered, is a matter of much importance to our landlords generally, so it is to be expected that they will scarcely resist the temptation; and the competition for what they call "a bit of land" is so great, that the peasantry often outbid each other to an extent ruinous to themselves, though seemingly lucrative to the landlords. The result of this competition," as we stated in our former article on this subject, "is always the same, namely, the Romanist takes possession of the land, and the Protestant takes his passage to America!" Unhappily our landlords have learned to value a tenant, not according to his character for honesty or loyalty, nor according to his disposition to improve the land, nor according to the punctuality of his payments, but according to the amount which he adds to the rentroll. He may be a Whiteboy, or a Blackfoot, or a Whitefoot-he may be a Steelboy, or a Ribbonman-still, if he only offer the highest rent, he is declared the tenant; and, unfortunately, to make this matter worse in its effects, the landlords themselves pay little or no attention to the matter, but hand over the management of their tenantry to stewards and drivers, who being, in general, native Papists, steeped in all the prejudices, and implicated often in the designs of the ill-affected, take care that their companions in disaffection shall always possess the preference. It is a sad and melancholy fact that, owing to this system, the whole face of the country is by degrees changing owners— passing from the hands of the loyal, peaceful, and religious Protestant, who was a good tenant as well as a faithful subject, into the hands of the most active and wily of the partizans of those who are opposed to the interests of the landlords, as they are estranged from the supremacy of England.

A spirit of mawkish liberalism has been long affected by many of these landlords, to excuse their conduct towards their Protestant tenantry; and whenever we hear of a landlord professing liberalism, we at once proclaim him to be some necessitous and grind

ing proprietor; because we have ever found that it was a mere pretence to excuse themselves in removing their Protestant tenants, and planting Romanists in their stead. They profess, indeed, to think that there should be no preference given to one over the other, and that both should be treated on precisely the same terms. This profession, indeed, might be forgiven by us, as an amiable weakness, notwithstanding the disastrous consequences that have flowed from it, in the expatriation of the Protestants, did we believe that such professions were sincere; but, knowing the country well, we denounce all such profession as foul and rank hypocrisy; and loathing, as we do, such treason to our common cause, we tear off the mask, and dash aside the veil that conceals the nakedness of all that grinding avidity for an increased rental, which is the true motive of their conduct. They prefer" the Popish price" to "the Protestant price" for their lands, and then, unblushingly, talk about the liberalism of their sentiments! In thus denouncing this system we have only followed a high authority, even that of Lord Clare, who in his place in the Irish House of Lords did not hesitate to express himself in these words :

The great misfortune of Ireland, and particularly of the lower class of its inhabitants is, that at the expiration of every lease the farm is put up to auction, and, without considering whether he is Protestant or Papist-whether he is industrious or indolent-whether he is solvent or a beggar-the highest bidder is declared the tenant by the law agent of the estate, I must say to the disgrace of the landlord, and most frequently much to his advantage. It happened to me, in 1793, to canvass the county in which I reside, and on an estate which had been newly set at £26,000 a year, I found but five Protestant tenants !"

Such was the opinion of one who had no superior in knowledge of the true evils of this country. Now the manner in which this ruinous and disgraceful system operates is this. When the lease of the farm is expired, the landlord, or his agent, gives notice of his readiness to receive proposals; the old Protestant tenant offers a fair remunerating rent, in hopes of again

obtaining the farm which he has improved by good and careful husbandry, and he thinks himself, for that cause, entitled to a preference. The Roman Catholic then offers a much higher rent, and the landlord, affecting to be too liberal to consider the conduct, or the religion, or the loyalty of the parties-affecting to be too liberal to give a preference to any one, takes the farm from the Protestant and transfers it to the Catholic, merely because he offers a higher rent! Such, and none other, is the liberalism of Ireland! If, indeed, these landlords loved the peace of the country-if they sought respect for the laws-if they wished for loyalty to the crown-if they desired the safety of "the settlement" of property-if they wished for the maintenance of the legislative union-if these were the motives that had a fitting place in their breasts, they would fling from them this mask of hypocrisy, this affectation of liberalism, and encourage a tenantry respectful to the laws, loyal to the crown, and attached to the British connexion; they would cease, for the future, their yearly sacrifice of a whole hecatomb of Protestants at the shrine of their rent-roll.

Painful as is the contemplation of all this disastrous posture of affairs, it becomes tenfold more so when we reflect on the hopelessness of the case. In deed that which naturally flings a gloomy shadow of despair over the state of the Protestants of the lower orders, is the fact-painful, yet certain as the creation-that the nature and extent of the evil is such as to admit now of no remedy. The case is desperate and hopeless, owing, on one hand, to the prodigious and exhausting length at which the stream of emigration has arrived, draining our Protestant population of the very best conducted and most thriving of their number; and, on the other hand, to the pecuniary difficulties and embarrassments of the landlords. Those difficulties and embarrassments press down upon the landed interest, and especially upon the proprietor himself, to such an extent, that he cannot cope with them; so that while they display the utter hopelessness of the state to which the inferior Protestants are reduced, they form the only apology for the conduct

of the landlords towards that class of their tenantry. The vast majority of our Irish estates are so deeply involved with annuities, mortgages, and other incumbrances, arising out of the extravagance of the past or present generation, that at least one half the entire rental goes annually to liquidate them; and even then, when their crippled circumstances should lead them to habits of economy and moderation, the passion for electioneering, or the desire to maintain the importance of the family name, only plunges them still deeper in their sea of difficulties, and compels them to set their estates at the highest possible value. The great and general depression also, under which the landed interest suffered since the war times, and especially that scourging measure to our landlords, by which they were made liable to pay off in gold those mortgages which they had raised in an inferior currency, all conspired to involve the great body of our proprietary to such a ruinous extent, as to force them to have recourse to every means by which they could hope to increase their incomes, so as to be able to meet the demands of their creditors. We know of one county, upon the rental of which there are mortgages to the amount of above TwO MILLIONS sterling! This consideration will account for the extreme avidity with which our proprietary grasp at every prospect of an increased rental, although they are thereby ruining the whole body of the poorer Protestants. Our Landlords are too much embarrassed to retain a PROTESTANT tenantry.

This melancholy and hopeless system has not only ruined the circumstances and prospects of the Protestants of the lower orders, but has also had a sad effect on their minds and affections. A change has long been coming over their spirits, a shadow has passed upon them, and they stand no longer in the same relative position towards the gentry of the country which they once occupied ; an estrangement, growing wider and wider every day, is walking with the step of a giant among them, and so marked is this estrangement that in a few, a very few, years there will be no two classes of the population of this island so separated, so alien, so little identified in

interest and feeling, as the Protestant gentry and the Protestant peasantry. Very different indeed was the genius of long vanished years; then these Protestants were imported into the island, they were planted on the estates, they were encouraged throughout the country, they were fostered and kindly treated everywhere; all this was done by our proprietary, in order to secure a tenantry on whom they could depend, and in whose strong right hands they could rely in the hour of civil strife, for they felt they could rest in peace and pillow their heads in confidence so long as they were surrounded by such faithful men; and they in return for all this confidence and encouragement, felt every feeling of their souls pledged to respond to it, and to prove themselves faithful to the proprietary; the chord was touched and it answered in perfect harmony. So powerfully did this feeling master the minds of the lower order of Protestants, that every fibre of their hearts was strained to prove them faithful, and they clung with a desperate fidelity to everything connected, directly or indirectly, with the interest of property. The world gives no stronger example of close and unwavering attachment than that of the lower order of Protestants to their landlords. But a change is fast working among them. A spirit has walked among them, and it muttered, as it passed, a word that whispers of neglect and ingratitude, of unkindness and wrong; it awakes the memory of their former state, when their highest pride and loftiest boast was their standing forth in defence of the landlord, and rallying around the standard of poverty, when they were openly recognized as the only champions of the life of one, and the only allies for the security of the other, and it points to the change--alas, how changed!removing one by one, and day by day, from the green hills of their fathers, and the sunny fields of their youth, constrained to witness their homes transferred sometimes to the very individuals with whom they had struggled foot to foot, and hand to hand, in the strife and storm of the last rebellion, and now neglected and forgotten by those for whom they would have sacrificed their all, they are compelled to wander houseless and homeless among

those who laugh at their misfortunes, while they despise the landlords for their cupidity, and are at last compelled to seek for "happy homes and altars free" in the wide savannas or the howling forests of the American world. They cry with the psalmist of Israel, "It is not an open enemy that hath done me this dishonour, for then I could have borne it--neither was it mine adversary, for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him— but it was even thou, my companion, my guide, and mine own familiar friend! We took sweet counsel together and walked in the House of God as friends." Their troubles have indeed come, not from their avowed enemies, but from their professed friends, from those who knelt at the same altar and held the same faith and hope. Matters are, indeed, changed, and if the landed proprietors of Ireland are not awakened on their downy pillows by the burning and indignant malison of those whom they have so deeply injured as their Protestant tenantry, it is because their unhappy, yet generous victims, do even yet love, with a lingering feeling, the repositories of gentle blood, and look "more in sorrow than in anger" upon those who have so vitally and deeply wronged them.

II. THE GOVERNMENT.- -We would greatly err if we ascribed all this spirit for emigration among the Protestants to the conduct of our proprietary, therefore it was that we already stated that such conduct was only one of the principal causes leading to that result; and we then added, that the second leading cause arose from the unsuitable principles upon which the government of this island has too long been conducted. In making this charge against the government, we would desire to be understood as not alluding particularly to the Tory or the Whig administrations, or to any other particular phase or form of government, but to the general system which has been pursued for above a century-a system that seems throughout to have been marked alike by virulence and weakness, by hostility and concession; so that with reference to it, it may justly be said, that Protestantism existed, not by it, but in despite of it, and the consequence of which has been a more wild,

and unsettled, and turbulent state of society among the lower classes of our population than can be found in any nation in the world that professes to have risen from savage barbarism.

The lower order of the mere Irish have ever looked upon the government of England as one of conquest, as one in which the only right is that of the stronger arm and the keener sword; and they pay to it, in consequence, only that unwilling deference which the weak must ever render to the strong. They have ever looked, too, upon the proprietary of the soil, as a legion of strangers, who seized with an iron grasp the possessions of their natives and their ancient chieftains; and they have never ceased to view, with secret animosity, the Protestants of the lower orders, as being not only strangers and foreigners, but as being the friends and supporters, and, to a certain extent, the armed retainers of that foreign government and that stranger proprie tary. This feeling, so injurious to the peace of the country, is carefully kept alive, and occasionally fanned into a flame, by the priests and the agitators, who seem to labour day and night, by fierce harangues and by subtle falsehoods, to prevent the water of oblivion ever quenching a flame which they desire to see blazing lurid and bright upon every hill and in every valley even the elaborate speech of the great and powerful "Leader" of this extensive faction, when claiming in the House of Commons a repeal of the Union, displays a tendency to throw fuel upon this flame; for at least onehalf of it was devoted to the unhallowed purpose of raking from the tombs of the past, the crimes and horrors of the conquest, and evoking from the grave the unshrouded spectres of those dismal and blood-crimsoned times. It is this style of harangue that, in its more vulgar and detailed forms, is reiterated in every parish, and thus unceasingly ringing in the ears of the populace, keeps alive the memory of the conquest and the wrongs of their country, which they are carefully taught to associate with every thing English and Protestant in the land.

This troubled state of feeling among the great body of the lower Irish, comes under the notice of the government, and of the proprietary only, when

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it breaks out in overt acts of disturbance, insurrection, midnight legislation, and atrocities. The government and the proprietary then interfere, and fling an iron chain upon the people, and succeed in coercing them into an external tranquillity: but while the surface of the social state is thus seemingly smoothed and tranquil, the waters beneath are as deep and dark as before. The lower order of Protestants, who are obnoxious to all this hate, and who live and move among those dark and troubled waters, and who, therefore, know the monsters that traverse them, are kept unceasingly in a state of fear and alarm, being as conscious of the enmity of the people as they are aware of their own state of insincerity. In our former article on this subject, we stated that, "in every part of the country there has sprung up, of late years, a system of forming knots, or cabals, of all the factious and disaffected in the vicinity; those who feel themselves aggrieved by some government prosecutions; others who feel themselves injured by some needy landlords; some who are descended from ancient families, and are looking to the forfeited estates; and others who forecast the same objects, hoping to obtain something in the general confusion: to these are added some whose mistaken notions of patriotism and Irish independence, and others whose religious zeal, incites to the expulsion of heresy and the exaltation of their church. All these various persons are combined in discontent, and are in cabal with factious and illaffected intentions in every neighbourhood, and around it, as a nucleus, all the evil passions of the people rally. The great object of the longing aspirations of these persons is the expulsion of the Sassenach, and a vague and undefined expectation of some convulsion or revolution which will alter the present system of property altogether, and replace it with a halcyon state in which neither rent, nor taxes, nor tithes, will be so much as named among them. The conduct of these persons is what might be expected; there is no species of petty persecution which the Protestants are not exposed to from them, and from all that mass of population with whom they have influence. All the enmity of the native

Papists against England, against Government, against the Landlords, against Protestantism, is wreaked on the illfated heads of the lower order of Protestants. For some years this system has been carried to a fearful extent; so that our people are beaten at fairs and markets, and exposed at all times to the open hostility, as well as the secret enmity of the native and Popish population, insomuch that it would be impossible, even had they no other evils to contend against, for them to remain in the country. There is nothing more common, during the last few years, than for some Roman Catholic who sees a Protestant possessed of a farm that would be a desirable acquisition, to resolve to make it his own; and in order to effect this object, a system of annoyance and persecution is resorted to, a threatening notice is posted on his house, his family is insulted, himself beaten at the fair or returning from market, and his life made so uncomfortable, and, as he thinks, so insecure, that he proposes to free himself from all by emigration. This is the very object his persecutor was aiming at; and having succeeded in removing the occupant, the Roman Catholic gets possession of the farm. This is a matter of no difficulty; for he will offer any rent, and will be strongly recommended by the Popish underlings of the landlord, who is often unwittingly thus made an instrument of this system: and besides all this, the system of combination, which has been of late years so general among them, enables them to prevent the possibility of any stranger, or otherwise obnoxious person, getting possession of the land; and the landlord, in his own utter ignorance of the true character of the applicant, accepts that character, whether black or fair, just as the stewards or drivers are pleased to say. These men, owing to our radically vicious system, have it always in their power to darken and blacken the character of a Protestant, and to exalt the character of, perhaps, the most insidious and disaffected individual in the neighbourhood. God knoweth how often and how fearfully they have exerted this power with effect!" In such a state of existence for it can scarcely be called society-it ceases to be a problem why the Protestants of the lower orders

are so eagerly rushing to our shores for the purpose of emigration; the truth is-and there is no use in either hiding it or trifling with it-there is no peace, no security, no happiness for the Protestants of the lower orders in the very centre of a savage and hostile people, whom civilization has never tamed, and whose ferocious habits and turbulent tempers have never been chained down with effect by the government of the country.

We are disposed to think-for we are no party men-that the various governments which ruled this country ever since the revolution, were anxious for her good, and were desirous of allaying those billows which the storm of our passions was rolling over her bosom. Their intentions, we doubt not, were as excellent and amiable as we could desire; but, unhappily, that dark fatality that seems to blight and wither everything among us, seems to have hung over all their efforts, and prevented aught of good being achieved for her: perhaps it was want of power, perhaps it was want of wisdom; but, of a surety, all their measures have failed to tame and civilize the people, or even to stifle that awful aspiration after blood that seems to impregnate their periodical disturbances; nay, so great is that perversity of genius against which our several governments had to contend, that the very measures that seemed best calculated to their ends, have proved, in the result, to be of precisely the opposite effect. The great panacea of the last century seems to have been the enactments of penal statutes against Popery; now, independent of the impolicy of persecuting religion in any shape-for we believe that such measures do in general produce an effect the very opposite to that which is intended-we yet think that the failure of all these penal statutes may be ascribed to another and very natural cause; it was their very nature to be applicable only to the educated, and, comparatively speaking, the higher classes of society. They only were affected by statutes which excluded the bench, the cabinet, the parliament, the army, the bar, and, generally speaking, all the situations and places from which the Papists were excluded by the operation of these statutes; thus they pressed upon