ject to have his property destroyed or be put to
death. The reign of terror was complete. The organization which supplied
the place of the Land League of to-day dictated what persons should
employ and be employed; and while they forbad labourers from working for
obnoxious masters on the one hand, they prevented a master on the other
from employing as labourers any but those who were obedient to their
orders. They enforced their decrees by acts of cruelty and outrage; by
spoliation, murder, attacks on houses in the dead of night; by dragging
the inmates from their beds and so maltreating them that death often
ensued, or by inflicting cruelties which were sometimes worse than
death. The persons belonging to this organization assembled by signals,
made concerted movements, watched the movements of the troops, and by
information received so avoided them that the military were rendered
practically useless.

The ordinary tribunals were powerless to arrest this iniquitous
organization of murder and terror, which the Irish disaffectants and
their advisers even in that day appear to have brought to a system of
execrable perfection. Witnesses and jurors were terrified into silence.
In one case the master of a female servant was commanded to dismiss her
because her _mother_ had given evidence against a person brought to
trial for a capital crime, and similar cases were of almost daily
occurrence. Five armed men went to the house of Patrick Lalor, a man of
nearly seventy years of age, and shot him through the body. His crime
had been disobedience to a mandate to give up some ground which he held
contrary to the will of the Terrorists. The same system prevented a son
of Lalor, and an eye-witness of his murder, from giving evidence against
his murderers. On the trial of these miscreants at Kilkenny assizes, the
jury not being able to agree was dismissed. It had been arranged in the
jury-room that nothing should transpire as to the opinions of individual
jurymen, and yet, in _half an hour_, the names of those in favour of an
acquittal or of a conviction were printed--the former in black, and the
latter, or as they were designated the "jurors who were for blood," in
red ink. The result was that those whose names were printed in red were
obliged to leave the country. At the Clonmel assizes the previous
October (1832), when a person was to be tried for resisting the payment
of tithe, only 76 jurors out of 265 who had been summoned made th