certain description of reel, they prevent the importation of foreign yarn into Ireland, though its price is generally from 25 to 30 per cent. less than Irish yarn, and thus lay the manufacture under a disadvantage which is not nearly balanced by the bounty. Government will, no doubt, interpose to remedy this abuse.

We cannot conclude this article, extended as it now is, without entreating all who take an interest in the subject, stedfastly to oppose every scheme for providing employment for the poor of Ireland, by grants of money, or by the aid of bounties on particular articles. Such palliatives and anodynes may lengthen, but they can never cure, a disease which has fastened on the vitals of the country, and vitiated its whole public economy. The case of Ireland is too desperate to be treated in this way. When the measures we have suggested for allaying the violence of religious and party contentions, for attaching the inhabitants to government, and for maintaining the peace of the country and the security of property, shall have been adopted, then, but not till then, capital will flow to Ireland as a place of advantageous investment. But until these things have been done, the forced transmission of capital to that country, by the agency of government, will merely act as a stimulus to population, and will thus really aggravate all the evils it was designed to alleviate. It is not by such puny measures-by the miserable quackery of bounties and forced loans-but by drying up the sources of disaffection, misery, and crime, that Ireland is to be improved. It is indeed the merest delusion possible, to suppose, so long as the various causes of outrage and degradation we have specified are suffered to spread their roots and scatter their seeds on all sides, that it is in the power either of individual or of national charity to arrest the tide of ruin that is now deluging the country.

We have thus, for the second time, endeavoured to show, by a minute and detailed inquiry into the state of Ireland, that the miseries and atrocities which afflict and disgrace that unhappy country are not the result of uncontrollable causes, but that they all have their origin in, and are, in fact, the natural and necessary consequences of vicious political and civil institutions and misgovernment. The question, therefore, which Parliament and the country are now called upon to decide, and none more important ever engaged their consideration, is, whether they will continue, at all hazards, to support the institutions and system of government now established in Ireland, and attempt to put down disturbances by the gibbet and the sword, or set about

making a thorough reform of the abuses which have filled her with misery and crime, and endeavour to bind her inhabitants to their interests by a sense of gratitude for benefits received and advantages conferred? The statements we have laid before our readers, as well as every principle of justice and expediency, and the experience of centuries, show, beyond all controversy, how this question ought to be decided. As Englishmen -as lovers of equal and impartial justice-we owe reparation to Ireland for the wrongs she has suffered at our hands; and we owe it for our own sakes. It depends entirely on our future conduct, whether Ireland is to be rendered our best friend and ally, or our most dangerous and mortal foe. If we treat her with kindness and affection, if we redress her wrongs, and open her a path to wealth and prosperity, the Union will cease to be nominal, and the two countries, will be firmly and inseparably united: But if we obstinately persevere in our present system, if we continue to treat six-sevenths of her people as an enslaved and degraded caste, and to cherish all the gross and scandalous abuses which have cast them into the depths of poverty and vice, they will certainly endeavour (and who shall blame them?) to wreak their vengeance on the heads of their oppressors; dissension, terror, and civil war, will rage with increased fury and violence; and our ascendency will be at an end, the instant it cannot be maintained by force of arms!

ART. VI. Substance of the Speech of Mr M. A. TAYLOR in the House of Commons, on Wednesday the 30th of May 1821, on the Delays in the High Court of Chancery, and the Appellant Jurisdiction of the House of Lords. London, 1821.

IT

is curious to observe by what slow degrees, and after how many struggles and difficulties, every public grievance is redressed in this country. Carelessness and indifference about the object proposed to be gained, jealousy of the person making the attempt, suspicion or misrepresentation of his motives, a blind and overweening confidence in whatever is, because it is,-must be admitted to be formidable obstacles in the way of the most temperate reforms. Nor do we here allude merely to the selfish and interested opposition of those who derive benefit from existing abuses, and whose resistance (in itself by no means trivial or unimportant) must, therefore, be calculated upon as of course. Our remarks are meant to be extended much further. There is, we presume, at all times— there certainly is in the present-a set of sleek and satisfied per

sons, who, provided their own affairs go on well, care little about any thing else; and who, estimating the value of all institutions by their supposed good effect upon themselves, feel every project of alteration or amendment as, in some sort, an attack upon a system, with which they fondly imagine their own prosperity is bound up. Who, for instance, has lately heard of a large portion of that generally satisfied, tolerably well clothed, and perfectly well fed body, commonly called the landed interest or country gentlemen, distinguishing themselves in any other manner, than by throwing their dead and heavy weight into the doubtfully preponderating scale of the majority upon every question, which, by possibility, might affect the existence of any, no matter what, administration,-until suddenly a great light broke in upon the quarter of self-interest, and they became patriotic enough to vote for the repeal of some couple of taxes, not so much because the tenants could not pay those taxes, as because they could not pay their own rents? And of a congenial spirit and feeling are the whole body of snug and warm persons (as Parson Trulliber, if we mistake not, denominates them) throughout the whole community, whom the above mentioned class of representatives fitly designate, who are, in truth, the vis inertia of society, and constitute, as it were, the natural resistance to every change, by whatever wisdom suggested, by whatever necessity enforced.

Time, however, and reason often enforced, operate at last; and that, too, in directions and through means sometimes least of all expected or foreseen. Nobody can have forgotten, by what slow and painful steps the late revered Sir S. Romilly advanced towards a very limited amendment of the penal laws,each statutory provision having been fought for, as for a portion of the wisdom of our ancestors: But, within ten years after those meritorious and comparatively unsuccessful exertions, a Minister of the Crown, and one whose claims to his situation depend not a little upon his belonging to the resistance faction, made, by virtue of place and authority,-almost without notice, certainly without opposition, a more extensive massacre of that portion of the above mentioned wisdom which consists in penal provisions, (such as making it a capital felony to steal the same article on one side of a fence, and not capital on the other), than the great man to whom we have alluded, with all his knowledge, experience, and wisdom, could effect in the whole course of his life. Who could enumerate, if any body could endure the enumeration, all that has been written and said

* Mr Peel.

in favour of the Navigation Act, and the whole code of maritime laws affecting our intercourse with foreign countries,-the true cause (as the orthodox doctrine has been) of our naval ascendency and greatness,-the support and pillar of the wealth and glory of England? Long, indeed, have these venerable errors been exposed, by arguments not to be resisted, both in and out of Parliament; and we know, for how long a time, in vain. At length arise a set of revolutionary ministers, who, under the pressure of no adverse motion, upon the suggestion of no clamorous remonstrance or representation from the country, themselves bring forward measures destructive of all the cumbrous mummery, which habitual respect had consecrated, and, by so doing, have, we suspect, shaken, in no small degree, the confidence in them of the true admirers of the genuine and whole constitution. To take one example more. It must be fresh in the recollection of our readers, for how great a length of time the annual exposition of the financial affairs of the country was involved in studied and impenetrable obscurity. In vain did Mr Tierney and others, year after year, suggest that the same rules of arithmetic must be applicable to public and private accounts, and that the two operations of addition and subtraction are essentially different from each other, whether performed in a minister's budget, or a private trader's balance sheet. These appeared, at the time, most questionable and startling novelties, the invention of faction, and dangerous to the safety of the State. But men may be shamed out of their errors at last; and, accordingly, we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer (not indeed the right honourable gentleman who had so large a share in the explosion of these disgraceful absurdities), who has brought himself to acknowledge the established properties of figures, and has made such a proficiency as actually to set down the debts and credits,-the income and the outgoings,-on the right side of the national account; and, what is droll enough, all these things are promulgated as original ideas, redounding to the praise of the men who have been reluctantly forced to adopt them; and those who, by long perseverance, have forced them on their adversaries, are still reviled as factious innovators! The course of proceeding, with reference to the Court of Chancery, has been very much in unison with what we have briefly described as the ordinary train of events, where any reformation or improvement is attempted. It is now fifteen years since Mr Michael Angelo Taylor, of whom we have, on a former occasion, justly made honourable mention, brought forward, in the House of Commons, the grievances endured by the country from the delay and expenses in that Court. It is

well known how often those motions have been repeated by that gentleman, and the attention of the public (which indeed required no hint), and of all persons connected with the subject, called distinctly to it. The fate which attended them, and the manner in which inquiry was evaded, though once voted to be necessary, we have formerly explained. Our present business is only with the renewal and repetition of his motion, which was met (with the single exception above alluded to) in the customary method of vague and indiscriminate assertion and round denial. In the year 1823, it will be recollected that the subject was again brought before Parliament by Mr Williams; and then also the old, approved, and never-failing plan of opposition was resorted to again. It was then directly alleged, that there were no real complaints against the Court, or any part of it; that there were no arrears of business, properly so called; that there was no unnecessary expense; that there were no delays in any thing, or any body, beyond that reasonable quantity of repose, which conduces to the well-being of the suitor, and befits the measured and cautious progress of judicial proceedings;-but grievances, or grounds for injuring, none absolutely none! And so, we need not add, as those assertions came from the right side of the House, the majority voted. Within eight short months, however, the subject was brought forward again; with little novelty, and with literally no change of circumstances, except indeed that slow and gradual change to which we have before alluded, which is at length effected upon the most reluctant and obdurate, by the pressure of public opinion, when roused and engaged by continual appeals to it :-When, behold, a minister of the crown, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, up rises, and, taking away all discussion out of the hands of those who might be presumed, so far as the materials they had would allow, to be prepared for it, declares, that whatever assertions and denials might have been made, he, at least, would not affirm that there was nothing wrong in the Court of Chancery; that an inquiry (of a nature peculiar, indeed, and to which we shall advert immediately) was extremely proper, and announcing, at the same time, to the astonished public, that the Lord Chancellor himself, of all the men in the world, had recommended the measure for the immediate adoption of his Majesty! The minister proceeded to explain, that it was only to one species of inquiry that he would assent; for that he never could be prevailed upon to agree to any that could have the remotest aspect of criminating the Chancellor (such effect, the right honourable gentleman seemed to think, must necessarily be produced by any at