hich have continually sustained themselves in Ireland, propagated
their several curses from age to age, and at this moment equally point to
a burden of misery in the forward direction for the Irish, and backwards
to a burden of reproach for the English. More men applied to Ireland, more
money and more determined legislation spent upon Ireland in times long
past, would have saved England tenfold expenditure of all these elements
in the three centuries immediately behind us, and possibly in that which
is immediately a-head. Such men as Bishop Bedell, as Bishop Jeremy Taylor,
or even as Bishop Berkeley, meeting in one generation and in one paternal
council, would have made Ireland long ago, by colonization and by
Protestantism, that civilized nation which, with all her advances in
mechanic arts[30] of education as yet she is not; would have made her that
tractable nation, which, after all her lustrations by fire and blood, for
her own misfortune she never has been; would have made her that strong arm
of the empire, which hitherto, with all her teeming population, for the
common misfortune of Europe she neither has been nor promises to be. By
and through this neglect it is, that on the inner hearths of the Roman
Catholic Irish, on the very altars of their _lares_ and _penates_, burns
for ever a sullen spark of disaffection to that imperial household, with
which, nevertheless and for ever, their own lot is bound up for evil and
for good; a spark always liable to be fanned by traitors--a spark for ever
kindling into rebellion; and in this has lain perpetually a delusive
encouragement to the hostility of Spain and France, whilst to her own
children, it is the one great snare which besets their feet. This great
evil of imperfect possession--if now it is almost past healing in its
general operation as an engine of civilization, and as applied to the
social training of the people--is nevertheless open to relief as respects
any purpose of the Government, towards which there may be reason to
anticipate a martial resistance. That part of the general policy fell
naturally under the care of our present great Commander-in-chief. Of him
it was that we spoke last month as watching Mr O'Connell's slightest
movements, searching him and nailing him with his eye. We told the reader
at the same time, that Government, as with good reason we believed, had
not been idle during the summer; their work had proceeded in silence; but,
upon any explosion