a gentleman, must--but I am talking nonsense, they know their
situation too well to think of it; they can have no defence, but by means
of protection from one gentleman against another, who probably protects
his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat.

The colours of this picture are not charged. To assert that all these
cases are common would be an exaggeration, but to say that an unfeeling
landlord will do all this with impunity, is to keep strictly to truth:
and what is liberty but a farce and a jest, if its blessings are received
as the favour of kindness and humanity, instead of being the inheritance
of right?

Consequences have flowed from these oppressions which ought long ago to
have put a stop to them. In England we have heard much of White-boys,
Steel-boys, Oak-boys, Peep-of-day-boys, etc. But these various
insurgents are not to be confounded, for they are very different. The
proper distinction in the discontents of the people is into Protestant
and Catholic. All but the White-boys were among the manufacturing
Protestants in the north: the White-boys Catholic labourers in the south.
From the best intelligence I could gain, the riots of the manufacturers
had no other foundation but such variations in the manufacture as all
fabrics experience, and which they had themselves known and submitted to
before. The case, however, was different with the White-boys, who being
labouring Catholics met with all those oppressions I have described, and
would probably have continued in full submission had not very severe
treatment in respect of tithes, united with a great speculative rise of
rent about the same time, blown up the flame of resistance; the atrocious
acts they were guilty of made them the object of general indignation;
acts were passed for their punishment, which seemed calculated for the
meridian of Barbary. This arose to such a height that by one they were
to be hanged under circumstances without the common formalities of a
trial, which, though repealed the following session, marks the spirit of
punishment; while others remain yet the law of the land, that would if
executed tend more to raise than quell an insurrection. From all which
it is manifest that the gentlemen of Ireland never thought of a radical
cure from overlooking the real cause of the disease, which in fact lay in
themselves, and not in the wretches they doomed to the gallows. Let them
change their own conduct entirely, and the po