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Erin, my country, sweet is the beholding

Which these bright days to thy true sons present:
Brethren in unity together blent,

And in their joint embrace the stranger holding-
Stranger no more! for love all hearts is moulding
To heavenly harmony, and upward eyes
Together gaze on Science, from the skies
Her glorious scroll of starry truth unfolding.
Yet mingles, too, a feeling, sad though sweet:
Life passes on—and while old hopes decay,
Old friends grow dear, and dearer every day;
Thus, with a deepening tenderness we greet

Those whom we can, while some are far away,
And some on earth we never more shall meet.

August, 1813.

W. R. H.

MODERN CONCILIATION-MR. HALL'S LETTER TO THE TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES.

ALTHOUGH this pamphlet can do no more mischief than may be effected by sixteen pages of not very remarkable writing, we notice it for a reason which, we trust, the reader, as well as ourselves, will consider sufficient.

In the course of the last summer we received, in our private capacity, a printed circular, which had been written by a nobleman with whom we had no personal acquaintance, disclosing a project, upon which the noble lord seemed to have expended much thought, and of the success of which he, evidently, entertained confident expectations. The project was a scheme for influencing the minds of the Irish people at large, and turning the thoughts of one portion of them from" Repeal," through the operation of the press. Newspapers, magazines, reviews, pamphlets, were to be engaged in this moral campaign. Some writers were to be persuaded, some paid, to render their services,-and tracts argumentative, affectionate, witty, and wise, were to be circulated in such abundance, and so well directed through the atmosphere of public opinion, that things of evil tendency were to fade or disappear, and wholesome influences alone to be exerted upon Irish society. For carrying this project into effect, pecuniary contributions were required. The nobleman whose signature was subscribed to the letter, undertook to preside over the distribution of the funds which his epistolary application was designed to raise. He would engage writers by whom Repealers were to be dissuaded from their pernicious enterprises: he would select organs and devise contrivances through which argument and persua sion were to reach the minds for which they were designed. Upon such agencies he would expend prudently the funds placed at his disposal-and (anticipating probably that the donations in aid of his scheme might not be sufficiently liberal) should the funds prove

inadequate, from his own private resources he would supply the deficiency.

We did not approve of the scheme, and we had not such confidence in the noble projector as might reconcile us to it. We believed his intentions to be good, we knew his reputation to be honorable, but we had never seen any proof that his knowledge of Ireland was extensive or correct. We were aware that he had opportunities of knowing something of what was worst in this country, most disorderly, most disaffected, most inveterately hostile to British connection: but we were convinced that he knew little or nothing of those parts of Ireland where justice and law prevail with least impediment -that he did not understand the loyal and stalworth portion of the Irish people, upon which in her sorest emergency England may repose a wellplaced reliance. It is scarcely necessary to say what was our part in this affair. A scheme to set up an editor or pamphleteer-general for Irish affairs, deposing the recognised directors or representatives of public opinion, we believed to be impracticable for good, and it was not recommended to us by the qualities of the highly-respectable individual who proposed it, nor by the epistle in which he volunteered to assume to himself the control of elements, wayward, perilous, and mighty, almost as those of physical nature, in a tone which seemed to intimate that his purpose of controlling and managing the press, should be regarded as a conde. scension, not an ambition.

We did not take any public notice of the noble lord's letter. Under the circumstances in which we received it, there was no obligation to secrecy, but there was, we imagined, no necessity for exposure. We did not promote the scheme, and we did not speak of it, thinking, indeed, that it would prove abortive, and having reason to believe that the noble individual by whom it was to be directed had found an occu

* A Letter to Irish Temperance Societies concerning the present state of Ireland, and its connexion with England, by S. C. Hall, Esq. London, How. 1843.

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pation more worthy of him, and to which we hoped he would prove more competent. Recently, we have been shaken in our security. Some suspicious pamphlets-some articles in the public press, have alarmed us; and we have thought it not out of our sphere to make the reader aware of our secret, in order that, when he reads in the daily or periodical press,arguments or suggestions alien from the well-known principles of the organ which gives them publicity, he may not immediately conclude that an enemy has taken permanent possession of a conservative post, but rather may hope that in an unguarded or a drowsy moment, (bonus dormitat Homerus,) when the warder nodded on his watch, strange lips gave breath to his trumpet of alarm, and the sounds it uttered were uncertain.

Whether Mr. S. C. Hall's "Letter to Irish Temperance Societies," be one of those productions for which this country is indebted to the enterprising nobleman who would suppress Repeal agitation through the instrumentality of the press, although it appears to us to bear evidence of such an origin, we cannot confidently affirm or deny. If it has been the spontaneous offspring of the writer's own mind, it should serve to diminish our repugnance to the scheme we have complained of, by giving proof that there needs no system or combination of forces to produce writings, of which the mischief shall be co-extensive with the circulation. Mr. Hall's pamphlet, however, is exactly the kind of production, (a little exaggerated indeed,) which we should have expected to issue from the laboratory of the noble projector; and as a fair specimen of a very bad class we shall expend a few paragraphs on it.

The "Letter to the Irish Temperance Societies" begins with an assertion of the writer's title to their confidence. He has served their country by praising them. He removed prejudices against the temperance societies and their great founder or promoter. He induced England to believe representations in their favour, and to look with hope on prophecies of the good they were to accomplish. His prophecies and promises to England, he now admits and proclaims, were untrue. They had however, been, until time had tried them, successful. Under the favour they filched from England,

and through the triumph they won for "that great and good man who was," he says, "egenerating Ireland," the "members, of the temperance societies have more than doubled." In the judgment of the Mr. Hall of 1840, the cause of temperance societies and that of British connection in Ireland would seem to be the same. In the year

1843 he is a corrected though scarcely an improved man. The progress of the temperance societies has been found concurrent with that of Repeal; and many a monster-meeting has given warning that the promises to England three years ago are not likely now to be repeated with advantage. "What does me" Mr. Hall? He turns from England to the temperance repealers. He tells them, not certainly in these words :-"Three years since I made false promises respecting you, which England believed, and of which you have had the benefit-now I make statements respecting England to you, which you owe me the favour to receive as truth. By belying my predictions, you have abridged my occupation among the Saxon-admit me to a sphere of exertion which may prove profitable among the Celt." Such is in substance Mr. Hall's plea for a favourable hearing. He has misled England for the benefit of the societies he addresses. The return he expects is, that the societies will consent to be led by him for the benefit of England.

It is true Mr. Hall wishes to impress upon his temperance allies that his advice will be for their benefit, as well as for that of England; but, in as much as their hopes and expectations from repeal are such as have either evaded his observation or, at least, are not contemplated in his argument, his admonitions, (even if, which is very doubtful, they are read,) can have little weight with them. He holds out to them assurances of moderate rents and good wages. They expect, should the repeal scheme prosper, abolition of rents and all other debts-release from servile labour. Mr. Hall's strictures do not reach the mystery of the repeal agitation, and his advice must therefore fall ineffectually on the repealer.

But our main objection to this daring letter is of a wholly different description. However little Mr. Hall may be aware of the fact, there is a

body of loyal men, not less than a million and a-half, probably exceeding two millions, in Ireland. The scheme of conciliation is imperfect, which does not embrace this high-souled portion of our people: the scheme which, (in its incautious eagerness to win another portion,) would wrong or insult it, can only do harm.

Mr. Hall addresses the temperance societies precisely as if they only, and those who were of like politics with them, constituted the Irish people. He writes to them "of the accursed penal laws," "these abominable laws known and execrated as penal laws." He desires them to remember "their altered position, masters where they were wont to serve; giving laws where they had been for centuries treated with obloquy." Did Mr. Hall, himself, remember, as he wrote thus, the "altered position" of the Irish Protestants? Did he know that those harsh laws which he pronounced "accursed," "abominable," "execrated," were laws under which Ireland was long prosperous and peaceful-laws conceived in the spirit of the age in which they were passed, justified, or, at least, excused, by necessity and by example, mitigated by the Protestants of Ireland, through a clement administration of them while they were in force, relaxed by them as soon as remission seemed safe, and every trace of them swept away, on the faith of promises no better kept than those made by Mr. Hall to England on behalf of the temperance societies? Does Mr. Hall know that the Protestants of Ireland are still smarting under a sense of treachery and wrong? and, however little sympathy writers of his dashing description may have with the betrayed-does he think it would be amiss to be a little less rude in his language, when offending even against the prejudices of a body who, whatever their errors, have proved themselves fast friends of the cause he professes to advocate? We enter into no refutation of his arguments-no exposure of the unsoundness of his political speculations. Language so measured as his, betrays sufficiently the writer's unacquaintance with his subject; and ignorance, we can assure him, is not the mother of conciliation. If he hope to ingratiate himself into the confidence of Roman Catholics

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by intemperance and exaggeration, he will fail they have had "somewhat too much of this" kind of eloquence; and if they do not say, they will look, with a roguish leer, the 'quære peregrinum' of the ancient Roman, modernised into the "connu" of the Gamins of Paris. If Mr. Hall think it a light thing, or an expedient, to insult his brother-Protestants, we trust that, at least, he has not power to irritate them. His individual opinion, unfavourable and unjust as it may be, is not insupportable, and if he be one of the agents employed in that scheme, which we have already made known to our readers, we have hope that the managers of the system will see that "letters" like Mr. Hall's can serve no honest purpose, and that they will either admonish him to be more temperate in his expressions, less enterprising in his statements, or else will change their hand altogether.

A single extract is all we shall offer as our justification for far more severity than appears in our strictures on Mr. Hall's brochure:

"I was in Cork on the 1st of July last. On the evening of that eventful day, I walked through its principal street. Twenty years had passed since I had been there before. Well did I remember its aspect then. At the end of that street was an equestrian statue; and at one side of it was a large mansion of red brick. On the 1st of July-in old times that house was illuminated from attic to kitchen; sky-rocketstokens of rejoicing-ascended from its roof. It was the club-house of the (so called) 'Friendly Brothers,' who elected the mayor and corporation of Corkand among whom a Roman Catholic gentleman would not have stood the remotest chance of admission. The sta

tue was on this "glorious anniversary" -decorated with orange flowers and orange ribbons. Crowds of men and boys assembled round it, firing pistols, squibs, and crackers; they were all of one mind-and that a most unhappy one. On such occasions, it would have been absolutely unsafe for any Roman Catholic to have passed along that street. This was in the South! How was it in the North? I need not dwell upon a picture-with which every man and woman in Ireland, above the age of twenty, is thoroughly aequainted. The statue and house are there still. the 1st of July, 1843, the one looked lonely and the other desolate. The

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mayor and corporation of the city are (chiefly) Roman Catholics, the chosen of the Roman Catholic people; and man or boy who wore an orange lily in his hat would have had his head broken before he had walked a dozen steps; and afterwards have been consigned to prison to take his trial for a misdemeanour."

The conclusion of this paragraph, we are to suppose, is the truth. It is a passage in which Mr. Hall reminds the Roman Catholics of their present estate, and of the dispositions in which they enjoy their freedom and ascendancy. In the city of Cork, governed by a Roman Catholic mayor and corporation, if a Protestant man, or boy, wore an orange lily in his hat, he would be, first, abandoned to the fury of a rude and cruel populace, and then, if he survived their brutality, would be imprisoned, and prosecuted in a court of law. We should not seek to palliate the imprudence or wickedness of a Protestant who offended in the manner supposed by Mr. Hall. We should not deprecate the prosecution and punishment of him by due course of law; but we certainly do not think it a matter of congratulation to the good citizens of Cork, that the ruffian-violence of which Mr. Hall writes with such a gusto, should be permitted to run riot in their streets; and we think it most discreditable to the Roman Catholics, who have been so highly favoured, to merit, even in the remotest degree, the representation so confidently and jauntily given of them by their Brompton friend and correspondent.

Whatever may be said of the passage to which we have just adverted, we boldly pronounce of the preceding portion of the paragraph, that it is utterly, and, we believe, inexcusably untrue_ "Absolutely unsafe for any Roman Catholic to have passed along the streets of Cork in the year 1823 !!”— still more unsafe, it is insinuated, in the north of Ireland! Unsafe during the viceroyalty of Lord Wellesley !— while Lord Plunkett was attorney-general, while Pastorini was in rapid circulation throughout the land, and Prince Hohenlohe was working miracles, and Doctors Murray and Doyle writing their well-remembered Pastorals, and Mr. O'Connell's agitation unbridled, and the Ribbon conspiracy meditating the utter extirpation of Protestants! Unsafe at that time for

Roman Catholics, on July 1, to walk the streets of Cork, or of any other town in Ireland!-and this affirmed not as of an isolated instance of lawlessness, but as a fair example of the state of the times! What can Mr. Hall mean? We will not venture to affirm. He must have retained, we imagine, some very misty recollections of past years, and seen objects in a medium corresponding to that state of hazy weather in which, by the bodily

senses,

"So often is a bush misjudged a bear."

And what is the reason of his sneer against the Friendly Brothers Society,

"The club-house of the (so called) "Friendly Brothers,' who elected the mayor and corporation of Cork, and among whom a Roman Catholic gentleman would not have stood the remotest chance of admission."

We shall offer no comment on the sneer with which this passage is graced, On the statement contained in it-the charge of exclusiveness-we shall observe merely, that Major Bryan, a Roman Catholic, conspicuous, it is well known, in the movements of his party, was a Friendly Brother. He never, we believe, withdrew from the body, and we are convinced that he would not, were Mr. Hall's statement true, insult his co-religionists and disgrace himself, by continuing amongst its members. But this is idle. Were Mr. Hall's statement true, neither Major Bryan nor any other Roman Catholic could have had the opportunity of withdrawing. The statement is not true.

But the spirit of the whole passage we have selected is more censurable for the indiscretion, if not malevolence, that appears through it, than even for its falsehood. To congratulate the temperance repealers of Cork on the impunity with which they may maltreat and maim any unfortunate Protestant who should offend their taste-and to enhance this felicity by a striking contrast-calling to the remembrance, or rather exhibiting to the fancy, of the Repeal champions, a time when he tells them they could not pass in safety through streets where it is now theirwont to play the ruffian. Is this what Mr. Hall terms" conciliation?" Does he hold it honourable, or just, or wise, thus to

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