the name of chief secretary; who, without the pageantry of the higher office, monopolized all its patronage and exercised more than its powers. At this moment dangers both internal and external called for qualities of a different order, and the English government was driven to the desperate resource of accepting the aid of great abilities, at the expence of abiding by the decisions of untrammelled independence. Such was the moment at which George the Second disdainfully appointed one of the cleverest men of his empire to the government of Ireland; and to this involuntary election he probably owed that he was not himself sent back "to give his little senate laws" in his patrimonial estate of Hanover.

It was in vain that "Popery and the Pretender" was the cry mille fois repeté in the ears of this new and singular Lord Lieutenant,—that the old measures of the Boulters and the Stones were proposed as the golden rules of viceregal conduct,-that preachers from the pulpit aroused the crusading spirit of intolerance against a sect beaten down to the earth, that the domineering party of a haughty ascendency assailed the audience-room of the Viceroy, and "stopped the chariot or boarded the barge," to teach him how to rule, to force him to recur to a system beyond the rigour of the law, which enabled them" to reign by dividing," while it placed him on the list of mannikin lord lieutenants, the wire-worked puppet of a bigoted faction: the acute, the elegant Chesterfield, soon fathomed the depths of their ferocious feebleness, and he played with the virulence he did not deign to wrestle with. When the advocates of intolerance preached persecution, he answered their counsels by an apothegm and a bon-mot-he quoted Cicero when they cited Nassau-he gave them parties for their politics-suppers for their sophistry, he forced them to swallow his measures with his claret-and he stopped the mouths of many with good dinners on whom good arguments would have been thrown away. In a word, he knew them all, he defied them all; and in despite of that party in the ministry which supported an anti-national faction, he saved the wretched country they were driving into a rebellion, which at that peculiar moment might have separated Ireland for ever from the mother country. By this personal combination of wisdom, humanity, and impartiality, Lord Chesterfield

When Lord Chesterfield arrived in Ireland, all the Catholic places of worship were closed. A Mr. Fitzgerald saying mass in the obscure garret of a condemned house, an immense crowd had assembled, and the floor giving way, the officiating priest with many of his flock were buried in the ruins, and the greater number were maimed or wounded. Lord Chesterfield, horror-struck at the event, ordered that all the chapels in the capital should be opened on St. Patrick's day, and they have never since been closed.

A zealous Protestant, thinking to pay his court to the Lord Lieutenant, came to inform him that one of his coachmen was a Roman Catholic, and went privately to mass. "Does he, indeed?" said his Lordship; "then I shall take care that he never drives me there."-Chesterfield's Memoirs.

The Bishop of Waterford relates that the vice-treasurer, Mr. Gardiner, a man of good character and considerable fortune, waited upon Lord Chesterfield one morning, and in a great fright told him that he was assured upon good authority that the people in the province of Connaught were actually rising; upon which the Viceroy looked at his watch, and with great composure answered him, "It is nine o'clock and time for them to rise; I believe, therefore, that your news is true." This system of alarm, be it observed, continues in all its vigour to the present day; and the actual Viceroy has to withstand the falsehood of the designing and the credulity of the nervous, full as much as any of his predecessors.

preserved a Catholic population in the most perfect peace and obedience, during the whole of that rebellion, which in Protestant England and Presbyterian Scotland had nearly restored the Stuarts to the throne they had forfeited by their blind and bigoted attachment to papal institutions -a memorable example of the value of an enlarged philosophy in governors, and of the disposition of the people to be grateful for kindness in their rulers, of their proneness to yield a willing obedience to authority, if encouraged by the slightest show of justice and fair dealing in those whom chance has placed over them. But narrow hearts and narrow intellects, impervious to the more generous impulses of nature, and placing the whole force of government in the scaffold and the bayonet-oppressing those they fear, and fearing those they oppress-have too long exerted their baleful influence in brutalizing and debasing the Irish nation into permanent anarchy, creating those abuses, which they now plead in justification of their own unpitying rigour and if in rare and distant intervals the patriotism and the kindly feelings of a Chesterfield have again found themselves under the canopy of the viceregal throne, the oppressor and the oppressed have alike been opposed to their beneficent activity. The good which Chesterfield effected in times of difficulty and danger, can now scarcely be hoped for even in the halcyon hour of peace: and should the British empire be again involved in foreign conflict, Ireland, unemancipated Ireland might be urged to seek new destinies for herself in an alliance from which she might have something to hope, but from which she could have nothing to fear more terrible than she has already encountered during the ceaseless miseries of nearly six centuries. Of this truth, harsh and repulsive as it may seem, no one who has studied the subject can entertain a rational doubt. The example of America iş before the eyes of the people, and the hope delayed and the promise and the pledge unredeemed lie deep in their hearts: restrictive and penal laws, too severe even for occasional application, have become almost permanent on the statute book; famine and pestilence have grown almost periodical in their visitations. From such premises what other conclusion can be drawn? An influence behind the throne, and greater than the throne, has chilled the sympathies and arrested the outstretched hand of royalty; even the collective wisdom of the empire has cowered before a party, and truckled to a faction; the cup of reconciliation, though pledged by a sovereign, has been drugged with poison; and a divided cabinet has distracted the country and paralyzed the exertions of the only public functionary, who for years has administered the laws of the country with any thing approaching to the spirit of mercy and of fairness.

From the period of Lord Chesterfield's administration, the effects produced by the permanent residence of the Irish gentry, were felt in that most blessed consequence, the developement of a public spirit. The English in Ireland, says Burke, began to feel that they were domiciliated, and had a country; and the Irish found that what was technically called "the English interest," was gradually fading before one common and independent national will! It was in vain that one of the belligerent chiefs of the church (always the fomentors of Irish discord) still struggled to uphold a system which was ruin to the many and power to the few. The proud churchman and servile courtier, the arrogant and despotic primate of the day, was taught to feel that he had

other times and other men to deal with than those living when the country sunk under the weight of Boulter's iron crosier. It was in vain that he affected to "do the king's business," (as he termed it) as other Protestant Wolseys had done it; and openly avowed his intention of carrying every government measure, à coup de main, and in spite of all constitutional opposition; for he lived to see the Irish gentry arrayed against the undue influence of despotic churchmen under the standard of an Irish speaker! The Irish patriots, led on by the chief of the Irish aristocracy*, united with the middle and the mercantile classes, forming but one caste in feeling and effort to array public opinion, against unconstitutional measures, and to put down for ever the direct and ruinous interference of ecclesiastical statesmen! The government was now awakened to the danger of employing the zealous and intemperate, by the resistance which the primate had roused into activity; and Stone, struck off the list of privy counsellors, the object of national hatred and party contempt, exhibited one more example of the vanity of unfounded ambition, and the weakness of that policy which is opposed to public virtue, and the plain rule of right.

The rapid progress which at this period public opinion and political science were making, through the agency of a resident and educated gentry, was so highly estimated, that an English Lord Lieutenant (Lord Harcourt), as the most popular measure he could bring forward to counteract the distasteful effect of other less gracious and salutary acts, proposed on the part of government (1773) A TAX ON ABSENTEES ! Never was such a tax less called for; for the absentees were not in that day in the proportion of one to an hundred, compared with those of the present times. Yet the draining of the resources of Ireland in the smallest proportion, the pouring forth of any modicum of native treasure into foreign coffers, was considered as nothing less than high treason to the country. The great English landholdhers of Ireland made a powerful resistance to a tax which principally affected themselves; but the majority by which the measure was rejected was so small as to leave no doubt of its popularity, and of the feelings of the

* In a contest for constitutional rights (1755), the Earl of Kildare placed himself at the head of the liberal party, which was then technically designated "the patriots" and the agents of the Castle and the Church faction having represented to the King that the Irish House of Commons was bent on destroying the royal prerogative, for the purpose of preparing his Majesty's expulsion; the Earl, with "the oulde bloode of the Geraldines" boiling in his veins, denied the calumny, and composed and with his own hand presented a memorial to the king, proving historically that the Irish were to a fault the upholders of the royal prerogative, and lovers of kingly government. For this spirited conduct, which recalls the opposition of the Kildares of old to the ministers of Henry the Seventh and Eighth, he received the glorious appellation of Father of his country.

The terrorism of former times having now yielded to a more salutary system, the expression of public feeling took a variety of forms. It was at this period that political toasts came into fashion, introduced into social meetings through the convivial talents of a Mr. Carter, son to the Master of the Rolls. His toast of "May all secretary bashaws and lordly high-priests be kept to their proper tackle, the sword and the bible," became a charter sentiment at all public and private dinners. The lordly high-priest was Archbishop Stone, and the bashaw was Lord G. Sackville, who brought all the pedantry of the schools to his official diplomacy, and added the superciliousness of fashion to the hauteur of conscious supremacy.

The numbers of those who voted were 102 for, and 122 against the measure. The tax proposed was two shillings in the pound upon rents and profits of landed

public on the subject. Those feelings, whether founded or erroneous, were by no means unnatural; and the government, on its part, has never been slow to encourage and strengthen them. The greater portion of the absentee property had fallen to the lot of its English possessors, by fraud or violence, by legal quibbling or by open proscriptions; and under the most favourable circumstances, the cultivators of that soil, which on the general principles of right and justice they imagined still to be their own property, must naturally have regarded with a jealous eye the foreign intruders. But in a country so poor as Ireland, so divested of all other means of making money beyond the cultivation of the soil, this annual exportation of excessive and burthensome rents could not fail to be viewed with great discontent. In England at the present day, if all the landed proprietors were to export themselves to the Continent, and to spend their rents in its various capitals, their absence would scarcely be felt, amidst the multiplied resources of commercial activity. Wherever the lord of the soil abandoned his dwelling, an East India Nabob, a money-broker, or a merchant, would stand forth ready to occupy his station, and rule over his domains; and the sums expended abroad, would rapidly find their way home, in increased demands for the products of English industry. On the other hand, the nouveaux riches, divested of hereditary pretensions and feudal prejudices, and more deeply instructed in the true principles of political economy, would afford less opposition to the reception and diffusion of the lessons of experience; and would therefore be the more acceptable to the labouring classes, than those who, trammelled in the prejudices of hereditary consequence, obstinately stand still in knowledge, while all around them is moving in advance. In Ireland, however, it has always been otherwise. Land has been ever the only instrument of industry, and rent the only source of accumulated capital. The landed proprietors, together with their immediate dependants, the members of the learned professions, have long formed exclusively the educated classes; and their expenditure has produced the only stimulus which existed, to excite the petty commerce and circumscribed industry, which in the country towns of Ireland support half-a-dozen shopkeepers; who, dignified with the name of merchants, fill the municipal offices and send representatives to Parliament. When, therefore, these favourites of fortune, the landed proprietors, expatriate themselves, their mansions are left silent and desolate; and none remains behind to employ the tenantry, to spread illumination, or to distribute justice, but agents, middle men, and the clergy, whose ex parte notions of right and wrong, whose different creed and opposed pecuniary interests wholly unfit them for the civil duties which are thus devolved upon them. With such reasons for the unpopularity of absenteeism, the interests of government in the prevalence of such a prejudice strongly conspire. When the wretched condition of the country is made matter of general declamation, the minister calls for specific abuses; and when a specific abuse is dragged to daylight, and remedies are loudly demanded, absenteeism is made a ready skreen to conceal the incapacity or unwillingness to redress

property in the hands of those who did not reside in Ireland for six months in each year, from 1773 to 1775.

It is stated in the public prints that 350,000/. are, at this day, taken annually from the county of Kelkenny alone.

of the governing faction. Tithe abuses are met by the charge of excessive rents and absentee consumption; corruption of the magistracy is defended by the absence of independent justices of the peace; and whatever is the evil to be averted, whatever the malpractice to be reformed, the ABSENTEES are the ready scapegoats for every delinquent, and the plausible pretext for every forbearance.

Absenteeship, however, always founded in bad government, becomes ruinous only as it cooperates with other and mightier evils proceeding from the same cause. In a well-ordered community the number and influence of those who eat the bread of idleness and enjoy the means of expatriation, can never bear an overwhelming proportion to that of the industrious citizens chained down to a spot by the habits and the necessities of their laborious lives. Wherever this relative proportion is materially deranged, there will be found much to alter in existing institutions. In such a condition of things, a restraining tax is as futile as it is unjust. Government exists but to protect property; and any law which restrains the owner's right of spending his money where he pleases, operates a violence, which the most urgent necessity alone could justify. On the other hand to expect that a pecuniary mulet, of any amount short of an absolute seizure of the entire rental, would keep those at home, whom a sense of injustice, of insecurity, and of the absence of educated and liberal intercourse (of all that makes life endurable and wealth enjoyable) drives into exile, is to be utterly ignorant of human nature, and of the habits and feelings of the aristocratical part of the community.

To the pause which followed the commotions of 1745, succeeded an event which belonged not to one country or one age, but to the great history of mankind and to ages yet unborn! an event, which though it has produced the most extraordinary and wide-spreading consequences on the social condition, has not yet half worked out its mighty and incalculable effects. The American Revolution, the greatest explosion that ever shook the complicated fabric of political abuses, the boldest step which civilization has yet made en avant,—was felt in its reverberations throughout all Europe; and even Ireland, remote, isolated, and oppressed Ireland, returned some vibration to the shock! England, amidst the host of ills which assailed her at this, the most awful crisis of her history, already beheld the children of the land she had so long oppressed, bursting their bonds and hailing with their wonted "ten thousand welcomes," the hope of emancipation, which came to them from the greatest and freest region of the earth. It was then that a British minister, worked upon by his fears, or driven by his necessities, granted a reluctant boon, for the purpose of winning back the affections of an alienated people, whose co-operation he wanted, and whose desertion he had but too just a cause to apprehend. It was then that he admitted the Irish to rights for which during past ages they had sued in vain; and flattered those with eulogies to whom he had hitherto denied justice. It was not, therefore, wonderful, though it was new, that when an Irish member in the British senate ventured to observe, that "Ireland was the chief dependence of the British crown, and that it behoved England to admit the Irish nation to the privileges of British

*Cead mille faltha.