re is no difference in principle between the honourable and
learned gentleman and myself. In his opinion, it is probable that a time
may soon come when vigorous coercion may be necessary, and when it may
be the duty of every friend of Ireland to co-operate in the work of
coercion. In my opinion, that time has already come. The grievances of
Ireland are doubtless great, so great that I never would have connected
myself with a Government which I did not believe to be intent on
redressing those grievances. But am I, because the grievances of Ireland
are great, and ought to be redressed, to abstain from redressing the
worst grievance of all? Am I to look on quietly while the laws are
insulted by a furious rabble, while houses are plundered and burned,
while my peaceable fellow-subjects are butchered? The distribution of
Church property, you tell us, is unjust. Perhaps I agree with you.
But what then? To what purpose is it to talk about the distribution of
Church property, while no property is secure? Then you try to deter us
from putting down robbery, arson, and murder, by telling us that if we
resort to coercion we shall raise a civil war. We are past that fear.
Recollect that, in one county alone, there have been within a few
weeks sixty murders or assaults with intent to murder and six hundred
burglaries. Since we parted last summer the slaughter in Ireland has
exceeded the slaughter of a pitched battle: the destruction of property
has been as great as would have been caused by the storming of three or
four towns. Civil war, indeed! I would rather live in the midst of any
civil war that we have had in England during the last two hundred
years than in some parts of Ireland at the present moment. Rather, much
rather, would I have lived on the line of march of the Pretender's army
in 1745 than in Tipperary now. It is idle to threaten us with civil war;
for we have it already; and it is because we are resolved to put an
end to it that we are called base, and brutal, and bloody. Such are the
epithets which the honourable and learned Member for Dublin thinks
it becoming to pour forth against the party to which he owes every
political privilege that he enjoys. He need not fear that any member
of that party will be provoked into a conflict of scurrility. Use
makes even sensitive minds callous to invective: and, copious as his
vocabulary is, he will not easily find in it any foul name which has not
been many times applied to those