n and inquiry, necessary,
and to entrust his majesty's official servants with additional power for
that purpose, and to employ its best energies to the putting an end to
the disturbances which affect that country; that, while the house would
give a willing ear and earnest attention to the complaints and petitions
of the Irish people, with the view to promoting an efficient remedy, it
was prepared to resist by every means in its power all lawless attempts
to effect a repeal of the legislative union between the two countries."
Mr. Macaulay taunted Mr. O'Connell with not having ventured to bring
the question of repeal before the house. He asked, what was meant by the
watch-word of repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland. If
those who used it meant a complete separation, or a species of Hibernian
republic, their conduct was both comprehensible and consistent; but if,
as they asserted, they only meant two separate independent legislatures,
under the same monarch, the motion was inconsistent with the first
principles of the science of government. After having shown this
inconsistency by a chain of conclusive reasoning, he said, that he
admitted Ireland had grievances to remove; but, he asked, was he in the
meantime to see the law outraged and despised by a misguided multitude?
Talk of the distribution of church property in a country where no
property was respected! and be told that to enforce the laws against the
robber, the murderer, and the incendiary, was to drive an injured people
into civil war! Did those who talked thus wildly recollect that sixty
murders, or attempts at murder, and six hundred burglaries, or attempts
at burglary, were committed in one county alone, in the space of a few
weeks? This was worse than civil war. He would rather live in the midst
of many civil wars he had read of, than in some parts of Ireland. Civil
war had commenced, and if not checked, it would end in the ruin of the
empire. Mr. Shiel, in reference to repeal, entrenched himself behind
quotations from speeches delivered by Lord Grey at the time of the
union, in which he predicted that it would only lead to distress,
suspicion, and resentment, and that the people of Ireland would seek an
opportunity of recovering rights which they would believe to have been
wrested from them by force. The interest of the debate ended with Mr.
Shiel's speech, although addresses were subsequently made by Mr. Grant,
Mr. Hume, and Sir Robert Peel. O