fective political
institutions, why, as was usually the case, were they partial in their
occurrence? Why were they limited to particular districts? If political
grievances were the cause, the injustice would be as sharp in tranquil
Wexford as in turbulent Tipperary. Yet out of the thirty-two counties
of Ireland, the outrages prevailed usually in less than a third. These
outrages were never insurrectionary: they were not directed against
existing authorities; they were stimulated by no public cause or
clamour; it was the private individual who was attacked, and for a
private reason. This was their characteristic.

But as time elapsed, two considerable events occurred: the Roman
Catholic restrictions were repealed, and the Whigs became ministers.
Notwithstanding these great changes, the condition of the Irish
peasantry remained the same; the tenure of land was unchanged, the modes
of its occupation were unaltered, its possession was equally necessary
and equally perilous. The same circumstances produced the same
consequences. Notwithstanding even that the Irish Church had been
remodelled, and its revenues not only commuted but curtailed;
notwithstanding that Roman Catholics had not only become members of
Parliament but even Parliament had been reformed; Irish outrage became
more flagrant and more extensive than at any previous epoch--and the
Whigs were ministers.

Placed in this responsible position, forced to repress the evil, the
causes of which they had so often explained, and which with their
cooperation had apparently been so effectually removed, the Whig
government were obliged to have recourse to the very means which they
had so frequently denounced when recommended by their rivals, and that,
too, on a scale of unusual magnitude and severity. They proposed for
the adoption of Parliament one of those measures which would suspend the
constitution of Ireland, and which are generally known by the name of
Coercion Acts.

The main and customary provisions of these Coercion Acts were of
severe restraint, and scarcely less violent than the conduct they were
constructed to repress. They invested the lord lieutenant with power
to proclaim a district as disturbed, and then to place its inhabitants
without the pale of the established law; persons out of their dwellings
between sunset and sunrise were liable to transportation; and to secure
the due execution of the law, prisoners were tried before military
tribunals, and no