certainly be advanced to account for the state of feeling by which,
from time to time, and by frequent occurrence, it came to be so
habitual among the people, that by familiarity it became stripped of its
criminality and horror.

Now it is idle, and it would be dishonest, to deny the fact, that the
lower Irish, until a comparatively recent period, were treated with
apathy and gross neglect by the only class to whom they could or ought
to look up for sympathy or protection. The conferring of the elective
franchise upon the forty-shilling freeholders, or in other words upon
paupers, added to the absence of proper education, or the means
of acquiring it, generated, by the fraudulent subdivision of small
holdings, by bribery, perjury, and corruption, a state of moral feeling
among the poorer classes which could not but be productive of much
crime. And yet, notwithstanding this shameful prostitution of their
morals and comfort, for the purposes of political ambition or personal
aggrandizement, they were in general a peaceable and enduring people;
and it was only when some act of unjustifiable severity, or oppression
in the person of a middleman, agent, or hardhearted landlord, drove them
houseless upon the world, that they fell back upon the darker crimes
of which I am speaking. But what, I ask, could be expected from such a
state of things? And who generated it? It is not, indeed, to be wondered
at that a set of men, who so completely neglected their duties as
the old landlords of Ireland did, should have the very weapons turned
against themselves which their own moral profligacy first put into the
hands of those whom they corrupted. Up to this day the peasantry are
charged with indifference to the obligation of an oath, and in those who
still have anything to do in elections, I fear with too much truth. But
then let us inquire who first trained and familiarized them to it? Why,
the old landlords of Ireland; and now their descendants, and such of