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143

A Glance at the Signs of the Times.

We glory in our Southey, Sharon Turner, Hallam, Gifford, Jeffrey, Hazzlit, Blomfield, Sumner, St. David's, Stewart, Brougham, and allow me, sir, to add, the distinguished father of one who is present.*

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against the tide of popular enthusiasm. Į be found in the laborious systematic reduction of knowledge to practice. Mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, and chemistry, are no longer considered a subject of mere abstract speculation, but brought to bear on the practical business of lifeare brought home to men's businesses and bosoms."

II. Conversing a few days ago with a very learned and distinguished foreigner, the question was put, "Pray, senor, what do our continental neighbours think of us as a philosophical people?" The answer was candid, but mortifying. "Britain does not at present stand high, on the continent, in philosophical repute. Your English philosophy is a mere nonentity. You have none that can be called, in the highest sense of the word, philosophers. The Scotch philosophy, now so popular, is laughed at abroad, as shallow and pretending. In literature, however, you reign paramount. You are envied, feared, and admired." This was doubtless a piece of very flattering intelligence; but if we dismiss our national prejudices, we cannot deny that the remark has some justice. To whom can the public now point as the great and eminent prop of science? Where are now our Newtons, our Bacons, our Lockes, our Clarkes, our Bentleys, Burnets, Halleys, Maclaurins? With whom are we now to confront La Place, La Grange, and the other numerous and illustrious continental philosophers? We have none worthy of such honours. Yet it may be asserted, that even though we should not have any very eminent individuals, in whom science is concentrated, yet can we fairly match the continent, in the extent to which philosophy is diffused over our nation. We have none, it is true, at present, who have reached the dazzling eminence of La Place, but we have thousands, (among others, I could name an Ivory, a Davy, a Home, a Herschell, a Leslie, a Gregory,) who have made, and are now making, rapid advances towards it. Had we not so great a number of accomplished scientific and philosophical men, there are those now alive, who, had they lived a century or two ago, without equalling those whose powers are above cited, would have passed as ten times greater men than they are now estimated. It would require almost superhuman powers to earn, in 1829, the fame of a Bacon or a Newton.

The principal object of modern science has been experimental philosophy. The last age was the time for the pure sciences. The great distinguishing feature of this present age, with regard to philosophy, may

Dr. Mc Crie.

Were the mighty Verulam to be suddenly waked from his tomb, to view the progress of science in the 19th century, be would be entranced at the amazing extent to which his inductive system had been carried,—at the triumphant, the uniform success which has attended its application. Yet a careful eye will not fail to detect one source of danger to which the present system of things is calculated to lead us; I mean, a spirit of high pride, and extravagant reliance on our own powers; and what can be in more direct contradiction than this, to the true spirit of philosophy, which sets out on a diametrically opposite principle? Several symptoms of the existence of this spirit might be named-as, the popular affectation now gaining ground, of contemning whatever is not capable of rigid, nay, sensible demonstration; the rejecting of whatever clashes with favourite and popular "general principles;" the fond idea that we, who have found out so much, can find out all that is discoverable. I allude especially to the phrenological nonsense which is so eagerly received, and the extensive prevalence of materialism. There are who tell us, forsooth, that mind is not essentially distinct from matter, because we "cannot conceive of it," with other equally wise things ejusdem generis. Truly, at the present juncture, there is need of a master spirit to sit at our helm, whose steady and commanding influence may regulate every stage of our venturesome career.

III. It is in this place, and before such a society, extremely difficult to speak suitably of the religious aspect of the times; it is a task requiring a tact and delicacy which I own I cannot command. I shall, therefore, be very brief and general. The first feature worthy of our attention is, the extraordinary and systematic enterprize with which Christianity is propagated among foreign nations. This interesting fact shews at least one thing, that religion possesses extensive power and influence in our country; a power exercised undeniably with charity and prudence. I spoke just now of the balance of power in Europe; and to this, I make bold to assert, that the preservation of religion is absolutely essential. This is a first principle, a moral element. With sorrow then is it to be stated, that not

145

The Miseries of Ireland, and their Remedies.

withstanding the honourable ardour of bible, missionary, and other religious institutions, there is a fearful apathy manifested towards it, in certain high quarters. I do not allude to the absurd and profane scurrility of a certain individual, in a certain house, or to that of any of his lordship's caliber; but to a general covert disinclination to recognize the paramount value and dignity of religion. It is now resolved into political expediency. There are those who are incessantly struggling to disjoin it from the state, to thrust it into the shade, to pull down all its ramparts and bulwarks, and leave it absolutely defenceless; and all this accompanied, forsooth, with a mighty chattering about its innate power and truth, as needing no external safeguard and pro. tection. Stupid and miserable sophistry! Looseness of religious sentiment is now, in a manner, fashionable; it is conceived to invest its possessor with an enviable bel esprit, with a certain air of lofty independence! But let us remember that we owe OUR ALL to religion. Great Britain is, as it were, bottomed on Christianity, Shake and destroy it, and our whole foundation is undermined, and the fabric of British glory tumbles into the dust. Before Christianity was introduced among us, we were painted savages!

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into exercise.
We have had an oppor-
tunity of measuring ourselves with others.
We have learned a very important lesson;
namely, how much may be said on both
sides of a question. Let this teach us to
avoid rashness and prejudice. We have
learned to bear with keen and sharp op-
position; to bear the humiliation of a
public conviction of error. Let this teach
us a habit of liberal, manly, and patient
inquiry. We have had our minds con-
tinually exercised, through the medium of
our pens and our tongues; we have entered
into the noble exercise of extemporaneous
discussion; we have been compelled to
use our powers and acquisitions. Surely
all these advantages cannot be lost upon
us-they must not be lost upon us. I am
sure we shall each heartily forgive all one
another's little heats and asperities; and
thus, if we do not all meet again, be
enabled to look back, in future life, through
the long vista of cares, anxieties, and
years, to the period of these weekly meet-
ings of the Classical Society, with grateful
retrospection. In conclusion, I beg to
tender my personal thanks to all of you,
for the consideration you have uniformly
shewn me, and to state, that whatever be
my lot in after life, be it high or low, I
shall remember you and your society with
feelings of lively interest and affection.

THE MISERIES OF IRELAND, AND THEIR
REMEDIES.

Homo sum,

nihil humani a me alienum puto.

Can the melancholy fact be denied or disguised, that we are overrun with scepticism and infidelity, and that it is this which discharges its shafts through the masked battery of Socinianism and freethinking? Not that we are totally and incurably corrupted; to say so, would be unjust and untrue. But I do assert, that the "dangerous essence" is instilled into influential quarters, and the Scriptures inform us, that in time, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. May God pre-vilization, so important a part of the united serve to me, and to each of you, a due reverence, a sacred and humble awe, for his own eternal truth, and the preservation of his worship pure in our nation.

Such, gentlemen, is the motley aspect of the world for which we are training; and we may be allowed, without undue assumption, to consider one subordinate part of that training, to be such societies as the present. Our meetings close this evening, and with them, a weekly fund of amusement and instruction. In my humble opinion, we have received both. We must, I am sure, have been amused at the many displays of genuine character which an observant eye must have traced throughout all our doings; the humour, the fancy, the irony, and sarcasm, which prorniscuous debate has occasionally called

122.-VOL. XI.

Ir is a most affecting consideration to every patriotic and feeling mind, that whilst Great Britain has made such large and rapid advances in wealth, knowledge, and ci

kingdom as Ireland, should still exhibit, in the mass of its population, nearly all the degradation and barbarism of the dark ages. If it were by the judicial visitation of Providence that a country possessing so many of the elements of prosperity, is doomed to suffer a far more than average proportion of misery and wretchedness, we ought patiently to acquiese in the will of the Divinity, and endure the evils we can neither alleviate nor remove. But if these effects can be traced to artificial causes; if the soil, whether in the natural or moral world, be barren of any thing but briars and thorns, only in consequence of devastation or neglect; and if the patient's malady be aggravated or perpetuated only for want of the appropriate remedy, it surely becomes the state physician carefully to examine the

L

147

The Miseries of Ireland, and their Remedies.

case, and exert all his faculties in devising and administering efficient means of relief. And in entering upon the subject of Ireland and her sufferings, we are struck, at the very outset, with the extreme ignorance and prejudice which prevail on these important matters, amongst a large proportion of the people of England.

Intimately connected with us by political and social ties, that unhappy country has hitherto never been regarded and treated but as a conquered province, instead of fully participating the benefits of the British constitution. As if our sympathy for human calamity should be in the inverse ratio of its geographical or moral proximity to ourselves, British philanthropy has been liberally extended to the most distant regions of the globe, while the necessitous and miserable state of the sister island has been comparatively neglected and forgotten. The conquerors of Ireland found her possessed of a comparatively pure faith, and blessed with a considerable share of social and domestic comfort; but they were not satisfied till they had substituted the mummeries of popery for the one, and, by the aggressions of war, had despoiled her of the other.

When England embraced the Reformation, she would fain have made Ireland follow her example; but the latter had been too much irritated, to be again forced or cajoled into a compliance with the religion of her rulers: re-conversion was by no means so easy as the original change of the national faith; and notwithstanding the most richly endowed hierarchy in the world, (which we conceive has tended rather to favour than check the growth of popery,) the sister island is, to the present day, a monument of the folly and futility of attempting to eradicate error by coercion, or of expecting that men will suffer their judgment to be convinced, till we are disposed to redress their wrongs, and conciliate their affections by proofs of amity and good-will. But how fearfully prejudice has operated to the bane of Ireland, and even polluted the page of history, the following narratives attest.

148

circumstance led Dr. C. to inquire into the truth of those details which were thus made, even in the house of God, the instruments of exciting horror and prejudice in the minds of the rising generation; and the result, derived not from Irish writers in their own cause, but from the admissions of their opponents, mostly English contemporaries, and were published in two volumes, abundantly proved that the unfortunate natives suffered far more cruelty than they inflicted on that occasion.†

The Irish being driven, in 1641, to form a league in their own defence, to preserve themselves and their religion from utter extinction, assembled at Kilkenny,__and adopted for their seal-Pro Deo, pro Rege, et pro Patriâ Hiberniæ— solemnly took an oath of true allegiance to their sovereign lord King Charles, his heirs and successors; and declared they neither felt the least disloyalty, nor meditated any injury to his subjects. They strictly kept their word up to the time of the Scotch landing in the island Magee, near Belfast, and massacreing, in cold blood, 3000 unoffending Irish families, who were living there under a feeling of perfect security, when the confederates were not able to restrain the vengeance of an exasperated people.

But while some party writers, followed by Hume, who has omitted to notice the above atrocities of his countrymen, have magnified the number of English Protestants destroyed at that period, to 150,000, and others have rated them at 40,000; it was proved by an English clergyman, from the most careful examination of documents, that only 4028 perished in the first two years, and not more than 6062 during the whole ten years of the war, exclusive of 800 families that had disappeared from their homes:§ whereas, the English retaliated with cruelties too horrible to relate, butchering the old and decrepit in their beds, women with child, and children eight days old; burning houses with all their inhabitants; and even warring with, and burning, the bodies of the dead; so that during the same time, nearly the whole Irish population was extirpated, and the country reduAs Dr. Curry, an eminent physician in ced to a savage desert. And it is a remarkDublin, was passing through the Castle-able fact, admitted by adverse historians, yard, in the year 1746, on the anniversary day of the Irish rebellion, he met two young ladies with a child, who, stepping out before them, extended her hands in an attitude of horror, and inquired whether there were any of those blood-thirsty Irish in Dublin. The party were returning from Christ's church, and had heard the service and sermon appointed for the day.

This

that notwithstanding the persecution and
obloquy heaped upon the Irish Catholic
priesthood, in the reign of Charles the Ist,
notwithstanding they were hunted like wild

Borlase, Temple, Carte, &c.
Cambrensis, Spencer, Campion, Morrison,

O Driscoll's History of Ireland. Eclectic Review
January, 1828.
I Works cited, and Cavan County Remonstrance.
§ Warren's History of the Irish Rebellion.

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The Miseries of Ireland, and their Remedies.

beasts, and it was a capital crime for any person to receive a Catholic priest into his house, and every priest found was doomed to be hanged, and his bowels drawn and burnt, and that, among the rest, Oliver Plunkett, a man every where revered for meekness and piety, * and who had been appointed titular primate, suffered an ignominious death; this body every where laboured to restrain the excesses of their own party, denounced excommunication upon all who should injure the person or property of any Protestant not against them; and the good bishop Bedell, (whose version of the bible, in the Irish language and character, is perhaps the best to be found at the present day,) though living in the midst of the rebellion, was so venerated by all parties, that whoever fled to his house, was perfectly safe; and his death, so universally lamented, that Catholics vied with Protestants in doing honour to his memory, attended his funeral in vast numbers, fired over his grave, while a Catholic priest present could not help exclaiming "Oh sit anima mea cum Bedello.' "O let my spirit be with Bedell."-And it is worthy of record as a fact, little if at all known in this country, and a very striking example of the christian integrity and benevolence exhibited by the Irish ecclesiastics at an early period, that at a synod held at Armah, in the year 1170, they effected what was perhaps the first formal abolition of the slave-trade in any part of the world. They unanimously resolved to prohibit the practice of buying English children for slaves, and to put an immediate end to the bondage already existing, as anti-christian, and as having incurred the just vengeance of God, in the invasion of their country by the British. And it is probably as little known, that the Quakers of Ireland were the first to take the field in this glorious cause in modern times, and that at a general meeting in Dublin in 1727, they passed resolutions to that ef fect, and thus anticipated, by thirty years, a similar effort made in the metropolis of Great Britain. ↑

But to advert to the causes of the sufferings of Ireland, and the means which seem best adapted for their removal or relief:-And 1st, The most obvious cause, and that which demands immediate attention is-a redundant population, in re

Burnet's Own Times,

It seems that an infantile slave-trade had been

carried on between the natives of Ireland and the English on the western coast; and that the latter had been in the habit of selling their children and relatives to the former. Cambrensis. Ware's Antiq. + Whitelaw and Walsh's History of Dublin.

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ference to the means of employment and
subsistence.
subsistence. It is, therefore, indispensably
necessary, in the first place, either to de-
vise some mode of abstracting superfluous
population, or augmenting the means of
employment. If Swift could say when the
inhabitants of Ireland were reckoned only
a million and a half, that "the wretchedness
of the country, produced by the oppression
of landlords; the impossibility of paying
rent without money or trade; the want of
common sustenance; with neither house
nor clothes to cover them from the in-
clemencies of the weather; and, the most
inevitable prospect of entailing the like
or greater miseries upon their breed for
ever; was such as existed only in this one
kingdom of Ireland, and in no other that
ever was, is, or I think ever can be, upon
earth;" what are we to think of the state
of society at this day, in which, out of a
population of seven millions, the great
body suffer a degree of misery which an
Englishman can hardly form an idea of,
and one million are believed to obtain
a livelihood by mendicity and plunder "?*

66

In addition to other causes, the system which has long obtained, of subdividing estates amongst four or five times as many tenants as they can maintain either in comfort or decency, has wofully multiplied a pauper and starving population, whose condition humanity shudders to contemplate. Reckless of all prudential restraint, and of any thing beyond the lowest point of a bare animal existence, extreme poverty tends indefinitely to stimulate population, and to entail an additional degree of misery upon every succeeding generation.

Swift observed in his day, that Ireland was "the only Christian country where the blessing of 'increase and multiply' was by man converted into a curse," and the evidence of Fry and Gurney in their "report to the lord-lieutenant," and of the numerous witnesses before the emigration committee, abundantly shews to what an alarming crisis things have arrived in that devoted country. We find there an overflowing population, about half fed and employed, and very generally the wretched peasantry living altogether upon a very scanty supply of what in England we should often deem too vile for the brute creation-potatoes and cold water! the miseries arising from the natural increase of a half-starving people, are wofully aggravated by the system now generally adopted by the Irish landlords as a remedy for the evils of subletting, of ejecting the

Report of Emigration Committee.

But

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The Miseries of Ireland, and their Remedies.

superfluous tenantry from the estates as the leases fall in, compelling some thousands of our hapless fellow-men and fellow-subjects, either to die of famine, or live by depredation and beggary, and thus making, what might at first have been a humane preventive, worse than the disease it is designed to remedy.

One gentleman, reputed for humanity, declared before the parliamentary committee, that a very extensive plan of improving estates was now going on in Ireland; that as his leases fell in, he had let an estate, formerly occupied by ten families, to two; and when asked what had become of the other eight, consisting of forty persons, he replied he did not know, but believed they were living amongst the neighbouring colliers; and he observed, that so tenaciously did these poor people cling to their huts, when ordered off the land, that he was obliged to pull down their cabins over their heads, and force them to retire !

Another witness stated, that he had known eleven hundred persons thus dispossessed of an estate, and the land relet to the larger tenants; that the ejected peasantry went upon the estates of adjoining proprietors, but that many of them, having no means of earning an honest livelihood, were necessitated to resort to thieving and vagabond habits for support.

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society which would not be endured any where but in Ireland."*

To prevent, therefore, not merely the general spread of famine, disease, and pillage through the sister kingdom, but the emigration of the starving peasantry of Ireland into this country, the consequent depression of wages to the very lowest point at which animal life can be supported, and an inevitably large addition to our poor's rates, already enormously high, it is indispensably necessary to adopt some plan of emigration, or to furnish the people with some means of employment at home. With regard to the first expedient, it is much to be regretted, that the plan recommended by the parliamentary committee, of requir ing the emigrants themselves to provide the expenses of the outfit and voyage, and giving them no assistance till located abroad, would only aggravate the mischief by expatriating those, whom, as possessing some capital, it were desirable to keep at home; while it would be altogether irrelevant to the poor outcast tenantry, to whom almost any change must be for the better, and emigration with proper facilities would be a vast and immediate benefit.

Indeed, the speedy adoption of such a measure seems absolutely necessary, in the first place, to relieve an immense weight of present misery, which must otherwise From another estate, twenty-eight or soon inundate both countries; but as it is thirty families out of forty were ejected; computed that Ireland contains nearly and as the men could get no employment, 5,000,000 acres of waste land, why should the women and children presented the not parliament provide means to enable the affecting sight of being obliged to go beg-unfortunate beings who may hereafter sufging on the highway. But the evidence farther proves, that in some parts of Ireland, as Tipperary, Cork, and Limerick, the system of compulsory ejectment cannot be carried into effect without military force, and incurring extreme danger to the life of any tenant who should dare to take possession of the vacated lands; and that in many cases, murder and arson have been the consequence.*

These are only a few out of the numerous similar examples adduced in the report of the emigration committee; but they forcibly shew the necessity of prompt legislative measures in behalf of the outcast tenantry. "Mr. Malthus would perhaps say, that in time the ejected population would become absorbed: but it is fearful to contemplate the process of absorption; and to think of two millions of human beings perishing for want, or hanged for violence and outrage, implies a state of

* Report of the Emigration Committee.

fer ejectment from their homes, to convert the most reclaimable parts of the bogs into arable land? Many humane and intelligent persons believe that immediate recourse to such a plan, would altogether supersede the necessity of emigration; as "the first expense incurred in transporting a family abroad would build a cabin, enclose a farm, supply utensils, and, with little more assistance, enable them to reclaim many a waste, but fertile tract, in their own country. If poor labourers are sometimes known to pay thirty and forty shillings an acre for permission to build a hovel on the edge of a bog, and reclaim a certain portion of the surface at their own expense, only give the forlorn peasantry farms on the waste land, rent, tithe, and tax free for thirty years, with a little aid in draining, and the expense of emigration as a small capital to begin with, and it is probable there would not be a sterile tract, or a

Eelectic Review, Jan. 1828.

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