circumstances which prevent her from being what she ought to be. In the
meantime, I trust the reader will have an opportunity of perceiving
that I have not in the _Tithe-Proctor_, any more than in my other work,
forgotten to show him that even in the most startling phases of
Irish crime and tumult, I have by no means neglected to draw the warm,
generous, and natural virtues of my countrymen, and to satisfy him that
a very few guilty wretches are quite sufficient, however unjustly, to
blacken and degrade a large district.

There is, however, a certain class of pseudo-patriots in this country,
who are of opinion that every writer, professing to depict our national
character and manners, should make it a point of conscience to suppress
all that is calculated "to lessen us in the eyes of the world," as they
are pleased to term it, and only to give to the public the bright and
favorable side. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the moral dishonesty
and meanness of a principle, at once so disgraceful to literature and so
repugnant to truth. These thin-skinned gentlemen are of opinion that the
crime itself is a matter of trivial importance compared to the fact of
its becoming known, and that provided the outside of the platter is kept
clean, it matters not how filthy it may be within.

In the days of my boyhood and early life, the people of Ireland were,
generally speaking, an honest, candid, faithful, and grateful people,
who loved truth, and felt the practical influence of religious feeling
strongly, but so dishonest and degrading has been the long curse of
agitation, to which forms of it their moral and social principles have
been exposed, that there probably could not be found in any country,
an instance in which the virtues of the whole people have been so
completely debauched and contaminated (I do not say voluntarily), as
those of the Irish have been by the leading advocates of repeal. The