of the Irish slave." "The terms I have used," continues Wakefield, (a High Tory and Anti-jacobin by the way,) "may offend some delicate ears; but does it not excite the blush of shame in the cheek of an Irishman, to hear that the internal economy of Ireland, in respect to agriculture, is very little different from that of the most despotic government in Europe." "The poor Irish, notwithstanding their ignorance, are aware of the situation in which they are placed. They are perfectly acquainted with the nature of the barrack system, and the military government which is employed to awe them into subjection." The Irish are now equally acute in penetrating the object of Earl Grey's Bill. But if such be the causes, what are the remedies? Those pointed out in this Parliamentary Report, and by a host of intelligent witnesses, so late as August last, are not the abolition of tithes, for every one declares this is done already-that tithes are at an end in Ireland ;—then, certainly, not the suspension of the Constitution-not domiciliary visits -not military tribunals composed of the brotherhood of Captain Dundas, (now Major for his virtues,) who is among the last public speci. mens we have of British military morals and intelligence in Ireland. It is, however, insulting to compare British officers with the late Captain, now Major Dundas. There is, without this argument, enough in the history of Ireland, and of all countries, against judges in scarlet ;—ever the fittest, when they are the most unconscious tools of despotism, and the most strictly honourable in their own nature. So far from recommending Military Courts, it could never have entered into the mind of any witness before, or member of the Parliamentary Committee, that in five little months, with no new cause save the hue and cry got up to serve a party purpose, the Whigs were gravely to propose the introduction of Military Law, and all its accompaniments, into a country whose grievances they were pledged to redress, whose wounds they were to bind up; and which, after ages of misery, arising, as they have always said, from misrule, they were to render peaceful and contented.

Let us now inquire on what Mr. Stanley's case rests? upon what does he ground a measure, the merit of which, according to its friends, and the old maxim, "the blacker the sinner the brighter the saint," is its extreme unconstitutional violence. The late outrages, murders, robberies, &c. &c., admitting the utmost stretch given them by Ministerial pleading, and Sir Robert Peel's oratory to boot, do not so very much exceed the ordinary average of excesses in Ireland in the dark months, when the peasantry are unemployed and starving. The elections account for some additional violence; the rigorous laws adverted to, in the seventh number of this Magazine, passed at the close of the last session, account for other outrages, severe laws ever tending to create the crimes they punish; but the resistance to the collection of tithe arrears, excited by the delusive expectations raised by the Government declaration respecting tithes, has spread more violence and crime throughout Ireland last year, than all other temporary causes whatever; and is, of itself, sufficient to account for the black catalogue arrayed by Mr. Stanley, when he threw the parliamentary evidence over-board, and tried to gull the British nation with anonymous information. Let us see what his own functionary, Mr. Barrington, a man of admitted intelligence, says, only last summer, in answer to the alarmists, about the general insecurity of life and property in Ireland.

"The Committee are to understand that, in your opinion, they (the disturbances) are simply agrarian ?" "Certainly." "Do you consider that in Ireland property

is as secure now, as it was some years ago?" "I think property is as secure in Ireland now [June 1832] as it ever was; and so much am I of that opinion, that, at this moment, I know some friends who are selling English estates to buy in Ireland. The rate of purchase of land has increased, I should think, from eighteen to twentytwo years' purchase for the rack-rents. I refused to sell a very large estate at twentythree years' purchase."

Of the tranquillity of the country, Mr. Barrington judged from the state of the province of Munster, in which he officiates.

"I certainly think," he says, "the state of my district more quiet than I ever knew it, and it has generally been the seat of every disturbance."

In this district are the counties of Clare, Tipperary, Limerick, Kerry, Cork, and Waterford, generally reckoned the most turbulent of the Irish counties; and some of them lately the seats of predial disturbances. What then can have occasioned so sudden a revolution? or are we to take the Ministerial statements with large abatement ?

We have noticed that the Catholic clergy, to a man, call for a poor law; not the extravagant English poor law, nor any peculiar enactment, but a regulated measure which shall be adapted to the pressing exigencies of Ireland, as the only means which can effectually put an end to disturbance. They are the most intelligent class of the Irish nation, in all that peculiarly affects their own denomination; that is, six-sevenths of the people of Ireland; and, though their opinions were of no value, let it be remembered that the best informed, and nearly all the other witnesses, support them. Look to the evidence of Sir Hussey Vivian, of Hovedon Stapleton, Esq., of Mr. Dillon, of Mr. Cassidy, of Hugh Boyd Wray, Esq., of Major George Bryan, and others to whom we cannot now advert. Their judgment is unanimous in recommending a poor law as the best and most effectual means of quieting the people; they say nothing of military law. And what virtually is the language of Mr. Stanley?" We will try our own despotic plan: it is readier and easier and every way more suited to our purpose; our troops are prepared to keep you down, and we have neither leisure nor inclination to think of the means of lightening your burdens, or of allaying the pangs of hunger, which, we are told, make you the desperate and ready agents in all mischief." Mr. Stanley's Coercive Bill was indigestible enough singly; but coupled with the declaration openly and harshly made in the face of the recommendation of a Parliamentary Committee, appointed in fact by the Ministers themselves; in the face of British justice and humanity, and in contempt of the unparalleled sufferings depicted in the foregoing pages, it never, never can be tolerated!*

But has it never occurred to any one that the Whitefeet and Blackfeet are but the secondary objects of this obnoxious Bill, if they are

* While we write, this vigorous Whig measure, driven four-in-hand through the House of Peers in one week, with little speech and much cheering, is undergoing wholesome excision. The staunch supporters of the Ministers, in and out of Parliament, stood prepared to bolt it entire. But Lord Althorp, and even Mr. Stanley, cannot, in the face of the country, of the petitions pouring in, and the faltering of Members who are well inclined to stand by them, force it over unmodified. One immense improvement is, that persons charged with political offences shall not be tried by courts-martial; but as has been acutely noticed, Somerville, the dragoon, was tried, apparently for a breach of military duty, but really scourged for sending a letter to a newspaper. Another alteration, good, so for as it goes, is, that no officer under the rank of a captain, can be on a court-martial. There are other important modifications; and we are mistaken if the Bill (if it does not break down altogether) will not come forth a mutilated changeling, loathesome to the eyes of all Tories and Orangemen, and to its great progenitor, the Irish Secretary.

objects at all? It has occurred to very many-it is the general belief; it is an opinion, gaining ground every day. Had O'Connell and the Irish leaders been conciliatory, yielding men; had the Irish elections gone favourably for the Whigs; were the Catholics of Munster, and Leinster, and the dissenters of Ulster, likely to be satisfied with the very moderate scheme of Church reform, proposed by Ministers, we should have found that the existing laws, and Special Commissions, would have been quite sufficient to put down predial disturbances in Ireland. Whitefeet are the target for practice, but Associations,—the Political Unions of Ireland, are the real aim.

The Whitefeet murders are the bugbears set up to scare the honest and well-meaning by arts as insidious as base; and as easily seen through as ever were those by which the Tories raised the howl of "No POPERY!" throughout a deluded country; while the Associations, the Political Unions of Ireland, and remotely those of England and Scotland, whose turn may come next, are the true mark.

With an honest dispassionate inquirer who allows this much, the next question is, what are the purposes of these terrible Irish Associations? If for Repeal of the Union, their object may be perfectly lawful, but it is unwise, perilous to Britain, and to Ireland ruinous. And this much we grant. But if the object of these Associations be to get rid, wholly rid, of the Sinecure Church, with its multiplied oppressions; to render the very word tithe obsolete in Ireland; to procure redress of those grievances, a few, and but a very few of which we have enumerated; to obtain, in an equal administration of justice, to poor and rich, Catholic and Protestant, the generous spirit instead of the mocking letter of the British Constitution; to procure, by a poor law, on an enlightened principle, something to counterbalance absenteeism, and raise" the Irish slave" some degrees above "the Russian boor :”—if such be the lawful and hallowed object of these Associations, claiming illustrious descent from the Patriot Volunteers of 1782, what English heart shall not wish them good speed! Put them down, then; but let it be by granting their just demands. Do not, for a great acknowledged wrong, offer some small remedy, applied in a quite different direction, and then swell into Stanleian fury if the little ministerial plaster does not at once medicate the deep-seated, festering sore, or if the wretched patient still writhes and complains. Put them down; but let the instrument be "that engine which the pride of the bigot, nor the spite of the zealot, nor the ambition of the High-Priest, nor the arsenal of the conqueror, nor the Inquisition with its torturing rack and pale victim ever thought of; that engine which, armed with physical and moral blessing, comes forth and overlays mankind by services-the engine of redress,"*

Speech of the elder Grattan.

THE ennuyés and do-nothings are inexpressibly fond of bewailing the monotony and tedium of the world we live in ; and every schoolboy who has a voice to quote the morbid murmurs of the Prince of Denmark against the weariness, staleness, flatness, and unprofitableness of human life, feels himself privileged to protest, that every thing has been already said, and every thing already done: that he is born too late; that from Ptolemy Philadelphus, the improver of the Clepsydra, to Borevese, the perfecter of chronometers, the moments of time have been measured by the same cold watery standard ;—“ qu'ils se resemblent comme deux gouttes d'eau ;"-that there is nothing new under the sun, the moon, or the stars!

As if the ordinary progress of civilization did not sufficiently diversify the surface of society; as if the discoveries of Science and the embellishments of Art did not impart endless graces to the solid sobriety of our jog-trot existence ! One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another; but they do not tell, and cannot certify in what array the morrows of this wonder-working existence will dawn upon our admiration: and no man can swear on Saturday at e'en, that by the interference of Brewster, Macculloch, Professor Brande, or Mistress Somerville, the sun of Sunday will not rise in a violet-coloured atmosphere, or kerchiefed in a comely cloud, by the aid of natural magic duly artificialized. Every now and then, some wondrous victory gained over the miserly reserve of NATURE, places weapons in the hands of mankind, with which on every side they effect new victories, and remodify the aspect of the habitable globe. An insight into her mysteries does not alone suffice; their application to vulgar purposes is the achievements chiefly important to the vulgar; and it is plain, that neither Newton's principle of gravitation, nor Harvey's exposition of the flowing tides of human vitality, is half so pregnant of change and improvement to the human race, as the liquefaction and impermeability of caout-chouc, the transplantation of teeth and forest-trees, the discharge of batteries and laundry maids, by the introduction of steam into four-and-twenty pounders and washing-tubs, and the manufactory of mattresses stuffed with air to float upon bedsteads made of water. All the monopolies of Nature are now infringed. We can undersell the old lady in all the markets; can produce fruits and flowers twice as fine as her own; artificial stone more durable than her best granite: we can make gems, metals, fire, air, earth, waters, and that fifth and mightiest element-STEAM,-every thing, in short, but money, which she does not pretend to make, twice as cheap as it is to be found in her old established shop.

Thanks to this wondrous amplification of the resources of mankind, the ancient globe is perpetually supplied with entirely new scenery and decorations. Railroads project their new line of business across the kingdom, to waft invoices and bills of exchange from Indus to the Pole; hay-stacks and barley-mows are shot flying, with the Promethean darts of Messrs. Jones and Swing; and the proprietor of the most naked downs that ever shivered round a modern country seat, may bring Birnam Wood to Dunsinane in a dray, whenever it suits him to consult the

Sylvanus of our Northern Agricultural Society. What would Burleigh or Bacon say to feats like these? or, rather, what would they say to the shrieveless, feckless, heartless, soulless, worthless pococuranti, who grumble of the monotonies of life, the lack of incident, the penury of change, such miracles operating around them.

It was but the other day that two of the magi of Paris, two necromancers of nature, two genii of the crucible, hit upon a notable discovery, which promises to revolutionize the surface of the physical world. Messrs. Cassron and Boniface St Aulaire of Paris, have invented a system of mummyfication, by which the various moulds of human clay can, (on the evaporation of the spirit wherewith they were magnetized into vitality,) be preserved from dissolution, and endowed with a secondary existence. The process adopted, is said to bestow upon the body the immortality hitherto monopolized by the soul; and the most paltry among us, is henceforward as sure of an existence in the eyes of posterity, as the veriest gnat or grub enshrined in a tomb of amber in the cabinets of the curious. "Time was that when the brains were out the man would die :" mais nous avons changés tout cela! There is no longer any hope of getting rid of our friends. Messrs. St. Aulaire undertake, that the preservation of the defunct shall be so complete and circumstantial, that in the body of an old woman on which they have already conferred immortality, " even a slight scar on the cheek is distinctly visible." Not a feature or a peculiarity will be obliterated. Sibthorpe, Wetherell, Eldon, and all the other old women in the land, will thus be bequeathed to the twen tieth century with all their scars and "blushing honours thick upon them!"

What in the world is to be done with the lumber which this unlucky discovery entails upon the world? Will not the worms arise, and demand indemnification of the living for the loss of the dead? How is the green earth to be refreshed? And how, above all, are we to evade the claims of sentiment created by the new order of things? Where are excuses to be found for forgetfulness of the departed? Who will ven. ture on a second marriage, knowing that the first wife of his bosom has lost nothing of living life but her activity of tongue; or what Ephesian matron will dare throw off her weeds, while her mummyfied deceased lord is frowning at her in all the severity of living life? There will no longer be the slightest pretext for burying the dead. Henceforward we shall be stuck up under glass cases round our drawing-rooms, like Dying Gladiators in bronze, or Dianas in marble: a man will be compelled to inherit his ancestors as well as their acres and their services of plate ; and our great mansions-our Longleats and Holkhams-will in the course of the next century exhibit a gallery of Thynnes and Cokes, instead of the chef d'œuvres of Roubilliac or Canova.

We humbly trust, however, that so soon as this curious process shall be surrendered to general adoption, accommodation will be instantly provided for the post obit generation that requires warehousing. Nothing short of a series of Egyptian pyramids will suffice. A species of mortmain constitution must be drawn out, allotting to each, in his degree, a niche in the domus ultima that is to redeem our dust from the dust. It is highly desirable, for the enlightenment of generations to come, that every mummy should be invested in its characteristic costume, and moulded into its favourite attitude. And it is not improbable that a great national gallery of mummies will be founded, in which (as in collections of natural history) every beast of us will be put forward after