made to feel that with war they must accept its risks, its burdens, and its sacrifices; and that if they desire peace, they must learn to maintain it by good faith and respect for the laws of the civilised world. Our statesmen may be assured that mankind will never deny themselves the dangerous excitement of playing with edge-tools so long as a protecting power shall guarantee them against the wounds that in their folly and inexperience they may inflict on themselves.

Mr. Whiteside, we fear, will see fresh cause to condemn our politics; but we think his opinion is rather nearer ours than he is aware—indeed we must pay him the compliment addressed by Sir Anthony Absolute in the play to the learned Mrs. Malaprop, that he is the politest of arguers, for every other word he says is on our side of the question. No honest man of the liberal party' (he says) 'ever denied the liberty, prudence, integrity, and impartiality of the administration of Lombardy under Prince Metternich' (Pref. p. xiv.). We believe that more justice has latterly been done to that administration and to the great statesman who long presided over the councils of Austria: but we suspect Mr. Whiteside puts the fact too broadly. He tells us he has abstained from reading the Italian newspapers, and we think his state the more gracious therefore: if he had read them, he would have found that every reproach that human malice can suggest is still addressed in them to the Austrianstheir allies and abettors; and that, for example, in a very recent number of the Contemporaneo,' a journal which he commends, the German is qualified as the 'Cannibale Tedesco.' But without referring to these partial authorities, we would recommend him to turn to the last number of the Edinburgh Review,' where we think he will not find the Austrian government described as conducted with a due regard to liberty, prudence, integrity, impartiality;' and we hope he would not exclude the writers of that work from among the honest men of the liberal party.'

We trust Mr. Whiteside will forgive the downright sincerity with which we have expressed our opinions. This is an age in which opinions of all shades are said to be tolerated; we would willingly defend the cause of common sense, fair-dealing, and political sincerity with all the energy of our conviction, and we are beginning to hope that the fair-sounding words of independence, freedom, and nationality are understood as they are meant. In Italy, at all events, they mean nothing but aversion to all laws human and divine-a burning zeal to get hold of other people's property, and eager schemes to instal a parcel of spouting and scribbling adventurers in stations which they never could fill with decency

decency-and for which not one of them will strike a manly stroke.

Mr. Whiteside professes to have no taste for the fine arts, and we think his volumes prove it. His criticisms he would have done well to suppress, and also his descriptions of buildings, churches, and antiquities; they are too diffuse to amuse the general reader, and too careless and inaccurate to interest the student; they are, moreover, to be found in the pages of all his fellow-labourers, unless, indeed, where he has stumbled on blunders too obvious to have been incurred by others-this being the only novelty his pages possess. His quotations from Latin, French, and Italian authors are unintelligible from the swarming misprints. His names of Italian persons and places are so invariably wrong, that no knowledge of the country will help the reader to his meaning-we cannot in common fairness attribute all these blunders to those careless devils,' the printers-he must share the burden. We would willingly, however, part with him in courtesy; we are happy to understand that he has returned to his country, and resumed his professional exertions with renovated health; and we think that the best fortune that can attend his book, that which his friends would desire, is that his learned brethren at the bar may speedily forget that he is an author, and that his numerous clients may never learn that he has been one.

ART. X.-Outlines of the History of Ireland. 12mo. Dublin. 1847.

THE

late disturbances in Ireland, though, as far as we have yet seen, of little or no intrinsic importance, have had and will, we venture to hope, continue to have, serious and valuable consequences. In the first instance they forced upon the Government a duty which it had so long and so scandalously not merely neglected, but evaded-of disarming the populace which it had armed, and of re-enacting with increased rigour laws which, when in opposition, it had factiously opposed, and when it came into office, dishonestly abrogated. The future results, we hope, must be the conviction, in every sober mind, that the theory of governing Ireland by conciliating demagogues and fondling agitation, which has up to this last session guided the Whig party, and indeed certain leaders of the Tories also, is absolutely and ridiculously false; and that, after fifty-might we not say five hundred?-years of unprofitable experience, we may safely come to the conclusion that as all the old modes of treatment have

utterly

utterly failed, we had better try, even at some risk, an entirely different and alterative system.

We shall look at Ireland in these two points of view. We shall take a slight retrospect of the past, and shall venture to express some wishes-wishes perhaps rather than hopes--for the future.

As to the first, we begin by the broad assertion that to the conduct of the Whigs while in opposition, much-in fact the greater part of the habitual disturbance of Ireland is owing. They, for their own party purposes, have thwarted all the growing benefits of the Union, and have fostered and exasperated all the original causes of national animosity.

In a pamphlet first published in 1806, entitled the State of Ireland, Past and Present, often quoted by us, we read the following sentences:—

'Not to be forgotten [amongst the causes of Irish disturbance and misery] is the madness or the malice of Parliamentary factions-surviving one senate, disturbing another-brandishing Ireland against the Ministry, not the enemy. She complains not less of the neglect of administrations than of the notice of oppositions; their feeble friendship, their inflammatory pity, their hollow and hypocritical help.

But a more pressing danger impends from those who have as their object or pretence the repeal of the Union; to many of the loyal an object; to all the disaffected a pretence. When the friend of Ireland, the partisan of France, and the enemy of England may coalesce, the coalition is alarming, however specious the pretext. Treason will shelter itself under its loyal associates till it dares to cast them off. It will use and dupe them.'-Ed. 1807, p. 60.

Two and forty years have produced no change in these points, except only that the wishes of any portion of the loyalists of Ireland for the repeal of the Union rapidly vanished as the objects of the Roman Catholic Repealers began to develop themselves. At first many individual interests and pretensions, and something of national feeling, had been offended by the loss of the Irish Parliament and all its local patronage and jobbing, but these soon gave way to wiser and more generous impressions; and we do not believe that there has been for the last five-and-thirty years in Ireland any one friend either to monarchy or to English connexion who is not conscientiously and decidedly hostile to the repeal of the Union, as certain to produce the early severance and inevitable hostility of the two islands. It is in the Imperial Parliament that Irish disaffection has been fomented; and the Whigs, in their greediness of place -though craftily evading any demonstration on the Repeal question-were eager to identify themselves in every other way with all the Irish Repealers-not, we admit, for their principles, but for their votes. Weak to contempt in England, they endeavoured to

fortify

fortify themselves by Ireland. Hence, when in opposition, their zealous co-operation, and when in government their indulgent sympathy with every class of demagogues-men whom they themselves have been since prosecuting and punishing as felons, traitors, and rebels. Hence, to go no farther back, the shameful Lichfield House compact. Hence the offer to Mr. O'Connell— who had been by themselves prosecuted and convicted for sedition, and who in return had stigmatised them as base, brutal, and bloody'―of one of the highest judicial offices in the State. Hence a long series of disgraceful acquiescence-of discreditable patronage of mean compliances-of, in short, an abject dereliction of the real duties of either a constitutional Opposition or a conscientious Administration, in favour of a party that professed principles avowedly hostile to any form of imperial government, but were willing to suspend the anarchy as long as they should enjoy the sweets of patronage. In this deplorable abasement of the once proud Whigs, when everything that was not contemptible was mischievous, a few circumstances, however well known, deserve to be reproduced in reference to our present inquiries, and as having had a direct influence on our present condition.

In February, 1833, the speech from the throne denounced the Repeal agitation; and Lord John Russell, then a member of the Cabinet, said that the real object of the agitators was

"Neither more nor less than an attempt to disunite the two countries— to confiscate the property of all Englishmen in Ireland-to overturn at once the United Parliament-and to establish, in place of King, Lords, and Commons of the United Empire, some Parliament of which Mr. O'Connell was to be the leader and the chief.'-Hansard, Feb. 6, 1833.

This was neither more nor less' than justly characterizing the Repeal of the Union as High Treason. This and similar speeches from the other ministers-Lord Stanley being then in the Cabinet -produced the Coercion Act, which, we may observe in passing, was, when Lord Stanley went out and the Whigs made the Lichfield House compact, suffered to expire.

Next year, in February, 1834, the King's speech again denounced the Repeal agitation; and the ministers (Lord John Russell being still one of them) proposed an address to the Throne

to record, in the most solemn manner, the fixed determination of Parliament to maintain, unimpaired and UNDISTURBED, the Legislative Union.'

This was voted by 523 to 38-Lord John Russell, of course, prominent in the majority. In that winter Sir Robert Peel was called to office. The Whigs renewed their alliance with the Irish

agitators

agitators they had so lately denounced-the Lichfield House compact was made-and Lord John Russell, now on the Opposition bench, declared,

'With respect to the repeal of the Union, the subject was open to amendment or QUESTION, like ANY OTHER ACT OF THE LEGISLATURE.'-Hansard, May 19, 1835.

As open to question as a turnpike hill! The unholy alliance was victorious. Sir Robert was turned out-the Whigs came inLord John Russell became Secretary of State-the Coercion Bill was suffered to expire-the Irish agitators were sopped with the Castle patronage-and Bully O'Connell, though still holding the rod of Repeal over the tributary ministers, so aggravated his voice,' like Bully Bottom, that he roared you as gently as a sucking dove!' When occasionally dissatisfied, then would be heard the sullen growl of Repeal!' but when the job of the moment was done, he again roared you like a nightingale!'

In 1841 the Whigs were turned out, and the Repeal agitation became louder, and now indeed more formidable than ever. Our readers will not have forgotten the popular demonstrations, or, to speak more justly, the insurrectionary gatherings, of the autumn of 1843, when Mr. O'Connell paraded his hundreds of thousands at Clifden, Loughrea, Lismore, Tara, Mullaghmast, and was only prevented from crowning his audacity by another of a still more military and formidable character at Clontarf, in the suburbs of Dublin, by the tardy but at length effective interference of the Government; and all these gigantic preludes to revolution were excused under the pretext furnished by Lord John Russell's declaration that the Union was as open to question as any other legislative measure.'

But Lord John Russell had gone still farther. In 1839, being then Secretary of State for the Home Department, and especially responsible for the public peace, he made a visit to Liverpool, where he accepted, from a mayor of his own creation, a dinner which, as was said at the time, his unpopularity with the respectable portion of the town would not suffer to be public, but which his own vanity and indiscretion would not permit to be private.' At this dinner Lord John Russell made a speech, published next day, of which the following is an extract :—

'He would not,' he said, 'before such a party, wander into the field of politics; but there was one topic, connected with his own department, upon which he might be allowed to dwell for a few moments. He alluded to the public meetings which were now in the course of being held in various parts of the country. There were some, perhaps, who would put down such meetings; but such was not his opinion, nor that of the Government with which he acted. He thought the people had a right