ROBERT PEEL.-DANIEL O'CONNELL.

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Jution to maintain and defend, by that spirit of unl ought affec tion which is the chief defence of nations.

Our ancient constitution shall survive at last, protecting the rich from spoliation, and the poor from oppression. No tawdry emblems of revolution shall float over its ruin.

"The flag, that for a thousand years

Has braved the battle and the breeze,"

shall still float over the ramparts. And that faith, and those national establishments intended for its protection, as they exist respectively in the three branches of the United Kingdom-those establishments which kings have sworn to protect, and to the maintenance of which the national honor is pledged, as essential parts of a great national compact, shall survive; and the religion which we profess, the offspring of free inquiry, shall find, in the diffusion of sound knowledge, new sources of strength; and great as may be the storm of adversity to which it may be exposed, it shall come out proved and fortified by the trial, and remain rooted deeply in the convictions, the feelings, and affections of the people.

ROBERT PEEL.

84. THE IRISH DISTURBANCE BILL

I Do not rise to fawn or cringe to this house; I do not rise to supplicate you to be merciful towards the nation to which I belong towards a nation which, though subject to England, yet is distinct from it. It is a distinct nation: it has been treated as such by this country, as may be proved by history, and by seven hundred years of tyranny. I call upon this house, as you value the liberty of England, not to allow the present nefarious bill to pass. In it are involved the liberties of England, the liberty of the press, and of every other institution dear to Englishmen.

Against the bill I protest in the name of the Irish people, and in the face of heaven. I treat with scorn the puny and pitiful assertions that grievances are not to be complained of, that our redress is not to be agitated; for, in such cases, remonstrances cannot be too strong, agitation cannot be too violent, to show to the world with what injustice our fair claims are met, and under what tyranny the people suffer.

There are two frightful clauses in this bill. The one which

does away with trial by jury, and which I have called upon you to baptize you call it a court-martial, a mere nickname; I stigmatize it as a revolutionary tribunal. What, in the name of heaven, is it, if it is not a revolutionary tribunal? It annihilates the trial by jury; it drives the judge from his bench,—the man who, from experience, could weigh the nice and delicate points of a case,—who could discriminate between the straightforward testimony and the suborned evidence,-who could see, plainly and readily, the justice or injustice of the accusation. It turns out this man who is free, unshackled, unprejudiced,-who has no previous opinions to control the clear exercise of his duty. You do away with that which is more sacred than the throne itself; that for which your king reigns, your lords deliberate, your commons assemble.

If ever I doubted before of the success of our agitation for repeal, this bill, this infamous bill, the way in which it has been received by the house, the manner in which its opponents have been treated, the personalities to which they have been subjected, the yells with which one of them has this night been greeted, all these things dissipate my doubts, and tell me of its complete and early triumph. Do you think those yells will be forgotten? Do you suppose their echo will not reach the plains of my injured and insulted country; that they will not be whispered in her green valleys, and heard from her lofty hills? Oh! they will be heard there: yes, and they will not be forgotten. The youth of Ireland will bound with indignation; they will say, "We are eight millions; and you treat us thus, as though we were no more to your country than the isle of Guernsey or of Jersey !"

I have done my duty; I stand acquitted to my conscience and my country: I have opposed this measure throughout; and I now protest against it as harsh, oppressive, uncalled for, unjust, as establishing an infamous precedent by retaliating crime against crime; as tyrannous, cruelly and vindictively tyrannous.

DANIEL O'CONNELL.

85. THE MISERIES OF IRELAND.

ENGLISHMEN, look at Ireland! what do you behold ?—a beau tiful country, with wonderful agricultural and commercial advantages, the link between America and Europe,―the natural

resting-place of trade, in its way to either hemisphere; indented with havens, watered by deep and numerous rivers, with a fortunate climate, and a soil teeming with easy fertility, and inhabited by a bold, intrepid, and—with all their faults—a generous and enthusiastic people.

Such is

Such is natural Ireland: what is artificial Ireland? Ireland, as God made her: what is Ireland, as England made her?

This fine country is laden with a population the most miserable in Europe. Your domestic swine are better housed than the people. Harvests, the most abundant, are reaped by men with starvation in their faces; famine covers a fruitful soil; and disease inhales a pure atmosphere: all the great commercial facilities of the country are lost; the deep rivers, that should circulate opulence, and turn the machinery of a thousand manufactures, flow to the ocean without wafting a boat or turning a wheel; and the wave breaks in solitude in the silent magnificence of deserted and shipless harbors.

Instead of being a source of wealth and revenue to the em pire, Ireland cannot defray her own expenses, or pay a single tax. Instead of being a bulwark and fortress, she debilitates, exhausts, and endangers England, and offers an allurement to the speculators in universal ruin.

The great mass of her enormous population is alienated and dissociated from the state; the influence of the constituted and legitimate authorities is gone; a strange, anomalous, and unexampled kind of government has sprung up from the public passions, and exercises a despotic sway over the great mass of the community; while the class inferior in numbers, but accustomed to authority, and infuriated at its loss, are thrown into formidable reaction. The most ferocious passions rage from one extremity of the country to the other. Hundreds and thou

sands of men, arrayed with badges, gather in the south; and the smaller factions, with discipline and arms, are marshalled in the north. The country is strewed with the materials of civil commotion, and seems like one vast magazine of powder, which a spark might ignite into an explosion that would shake the whole fabric of civil society into ruin, and of which England would perhaps never recover from the shock.

86. THE VANITY OF LEARNING.

To be ambitious of distinction in the world, is a commenda ble quality, when it excites men to the performance of illustri ous actions, for the benefit of human kind. But for the pleasure of being lifted up, for a moment, above the common level of mankind,—of being made a spectacle for silly people to admire and applaud,-of having his ears stunned with the senseless noise of popularity, many a man has forfeited his character with the wise and good, and inflicted wounds on his conscience which the balm of flattering dependents can never heal.

The love of learning itself is not to be gratified beyond a certain limit; it must not be indulged to the injury of your health, nor to the hindrance of your virtue of that virtue which is employed in discharging the duties of your station with firmness and activity. What will the fame derived from the most profound learning avail you, if you have not learned to be pious, and humble, and temperate, and charitable? Your wisdom is nothing worth, unless you are wise in working out your own salvation your researches into the depths of philosophy are but the triflings of an idle mind, unless they teach you to search out God, to adore his inscrutable perfections, and to regulate all your conduct in obedience to his will. If the condition of your parents is such as enables them to give you a learned education, it will be a shame for you to disappoint their hopes by idleness and profligacy. You must use diligence in acquiring all the knowledge you can of such branches of study as you shall be directed to cultivate; but you must not suffer the praises you hear bestowed on learning, to induce you to believe that there is nothing more excellent as a qualification; for piety is more excellent; so is benevolence; so is sobriety; so is every virtue which adorns a Christian. You must not let your knowledge puff you up with vanity; for there can be no cause for your presumption. You may know a little more than those who have not been instructed as well as you have been, or than those whom God has not favored with as good talents as he has given you; but those who know the most of any subject, know so little of it, that their knowledge is, to them, only a more convincing proof than other men have, of the great and general weakness of the human understanding. If your knowledge produces that reflection in you, instead of vanity, its fruit will be humility; and if it does not produce it, it deceives you. BISHOP WATSON.

87. THE MISERIES OF WAR.

THE stoutest heart in this assembly would recoil, were he who owns it to behold the destruction of a single individual by some deed of violence. Were the man who, at this moment, stands before you, in the full play and energy of health, to be, in another moment, laid, by some deadly aim, a lifeless corpse at your feet, there is not one of you who would not prove how strong are the relentings of nature at a spectacle so hideous as death. There are some of you who would be haunted, for whole days, by the image of horror you had witnessed; who would feel the weight of a most oppressive sensation upon your heart, which nothing but time could wear away; who would be so pursued by it, as to be unfit for business or for enjoyment; who would think of it through the day, and it would spread a gloomy disquietude over your waking moments; who would dream of it at night, and it would turn that bed, which you courted as a retreat from the torments of an ever-meddling memory, into a scene of restlessness.

Oh, tell me, if there be any relentings of pity in your bosom, how could you endure it, to behold the agonies of the dying man, as, goaded by pain, he grasps the cold ground in convulsive energy; or, faint with the loss of blood, his pulse ebbs low, and the gathering paleness spreads itself over his countenance; or, wrapping himself round in despair, he can only mark, by a few feeble quiverings, that life still lurks and lingers in his lacerated body; or, lifting up a faded eye, he casts on you a look of imploring helplessness for that succor which no sympathy can yield him? It may be painful to dwell thus, in imagination, on the distressing picture of one individual; but, multiply it ten thousand times; say how much of all this distress has been heaped together on a single field; give us the arithmetic of this accumulated wretchedness, and lay it before us, with all the accuracy of an official computation, and, strange to tell, not one sigh is lifted up among the crowd of eager listeners, as they stand on tiptoe, and catch every syllable of utterance which is read to them out of the registers of death. Oh! say, what mystic spell is that which so blinds us to the suffering of our brethren; which deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity, when it is aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands; which makes the very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softening disguise over its cruelties and its horrors; which causes us to eye, with indifference, the field that is