packed jury, whether by accident or fraud makes no an end of Repeal. The argument was an ingenious one, manner of difference; that the Chief Justice, with an the logic, as logic, irrefragable; but the fact turns out, indecency unknown in recent British jurisprudence, as facts are apt to do, most provokingly and obstinately volunteered his services as counsel against the pri- illogical. There is neither submission nor rebellion; soners; that the very judges who tried the case have not the remotest sign of the one or the other. The aginot been able to agree among themselves that they tried tation goes on better than ever; if a trifle less noisily, it fairly, these are matters on which it were super- certainly not less resolutely: yet the Queen's peace is fluous to insist now. Whatever the lawyers may say kept unbroken. The beloved and worshipped leader of though we all know what the best common lawyer on the the millions of Ireland is let go to his bridewell as Irish bench does say-the plain, unprofessional common- quietly, so far as breaking of heads or windows is consense of the people of the United Kingdom is clear, that cerned, as though it were some petty larcener sent to Mr. O'Connell has not had a fair trial, and is suffering take a month at the treadmill. The people's indignaunder an unjust sentence. Any thing, in truth, more tion boils; but they know better than to let it boil over. blunderingly absurd and unjust than this sentence-even They have had their political education, and they do apart from the practical bull of inflicting punishment credit to it. They are longing to have their will of us, while the legality of the accusation is still a question but they will not play the game of the enemy. Hating under appeal-any thing more outrageously inconsistent England, more heartily than ever, they say less about it. with the notorious facts of Mr. O'Connell's political life, They are patient, long-suffering, self-denying, eschew could not well be imagined. He has, no doubt, said and whisky and shillelaghs, and bide their time. We have done many things in his Repeal Agitation which wise men of late heard much of" great facts:" here is a great must regret, and good men censure; he has as clearly fact, and of the newest sort: a whole nation thoroughly brought himself within the law of sedition as Mr. Cobden, | drilled and disciplined into a system of political warfare and the Times newspaper, and nine-tenths of the Whigs, the most alien that can be conceived from their national and all the Radicals, and a good half of the Tories, and temperament, and the spirit of their historical traditions; every other man, who, whether by tongue or pen, has the most mercurial people of Europe possessed by a ever helped to stimulate popular discontent against any fixed idea; the most drinking people pledged to total law of the land, good or bad. But not for sedition is he abstinence; the most fighting people as quiet as Quakers, punished-not of sedition is he accused. Mr. O'Connell under an insult that galls them to the quick; the most is put in prison for conspiracy, or illegal combination- impulsive and passionate people grown diplomatic, carand bound over, under penalties, not to commit a breach rying on a struggle for national independence under the of the peace; precisely the two things of which he has advice of counsel learned in the law. What is to most studiously and conspicuously kept clear, through come of all this, we presume not to prophesy. Only one the whole course of a long and stormful political life, thing is clear as yet-that Sir Robert Peel and his -precisely the two things against which he has most policy have failed. The government have got O'Connell sedulously and effectually warned his countrymen. convicted, and (provisionally) imprisoned; but they That all political aims are to be achieved, not by have got nothing else. Their successes go no further conspiracy, but by open, legal, daylight agitation- than the Hall of the Four Courts. They have not a not by breaking the peace, but by doggedly and friend the more, nor an enemy the fewer. The "chief stubbornly keeping the peace this is O'Connell's difficulty" is as tough and indigestible a morsel as ever. idea, his creed, his philosophy, his gospel, the thing The imprisonment of O'Connell has not abated, by a jot, by which he is known, the specific contribution he has the numbers or the zeal of the Repealers; it has not inmade to the science and art of politics, the sum-total of creased the numbers or the zeal of the anti-Repealers: his life, the pith and marrow of the man. No public the government never was so weak in Ireland, O'Conman has ever more pertinaciously and successfully de- nell never so strong, as at this moment. The prosecunounced all manner of conspiracy-as plain, commontion turns out to have been a false move, based on errosense people understand "conspiracy;" and yet for con- neous data, and leading to results the very reverse of spiracy is he punished. No man has more signalized those intended. The policy of it is declared, by the event, himself as a vigilant and efficient peace-officer, (as Judge blundering and false. Burton acknowledged in passing sentence;) and yet not to break the peace, is he bound over under penalties. It must be allowed that the manifold blunders and indecorums of detail that have marked every stage of this business are in full keeping with the radical falsity with which it begins and ends.

It is not, however, of the past that we have now to speak, but of the present and the future. Looking away from the law, and even the justice of the case, we would ask what is it, and what is likely to come of it, as a stroke of policy? The Attorney-general has succeeded; but has Sir Robert Peel succeeded?

The policy of the prosecution of O'Connell was this: to bring the Repeal Agitation to a crisis—either of submission or of rebellion (moderate men hoped the former, violent men desired the latter)—and so, either way, make an end of it. The arrest and punishment of the agitators, it was argued, would either strike terror, or it would arouse resistance; and, either way, there was

This prosecution is styled, in ministerial and judicial phrase, a "vindication of the law." It is such a vindication as has done more to damage the law, to strip its sentences of the sanction of public conscience and opinion, to make it and its administration and administrators suspected, contemned, and abhorred, than any thing else that has happened in Ireland these twenty years past. That repeal partisans should quarrel with a law which convicts and punishes their leaders, is too much in the ordinary course of things to call for any special remark: but in this case of the Queen v. O'Connell, we have actually the legal profession itself, in open court. scouting the conviction, and cheering the convict. A more significant comment on the boasted vindication of the law, than that bar cheer, a more startling sign of the way the mind of Ireland is going, could not be imagined. There were the men who, as unconcerned spectators, had seen and watched the business from day to day, and from week to week, expressing, at the cost of

a most enormous indecorum, their utter contempt and abhorrence of it. There were the men of law-honouring, somewhat uproariously, him whom the law disgraces, acquitting him whom the law finds guilty. There were the men of precedent and etiquette-flying audaciously in the face of precedent, outrageously breaking etiquette, violating all the prescriptive and established decorums of their own profession. The convict "is sorry to say, that he feels it his imperative duty to remark, that justice has not been done him,"-to which the response is, "a most thrilling cheer for repeal raised by the junior bar,"-" continued," as the reporters tell us, "for a few minutes, and, as it was about to subside, again renewed, in obedience to the call of One cheer more.'" This vindication of the law is about the worst thing that has happened to the law, regarded as a moral influence forming and guiding public conscience and opinion, within the memory of living men. The only way the law can vindicate itself now, is by undoing, in the House of Lords, all that it has done in the Dublin Queen's Bench.

the Irish, the liveliest, the strongest, the most vivid, and the most enduring instance of the hostility of England-how to obtain something emblematic of English tyranny, significant of English vengeance, and suggestive of Irish slavery ?" Hitherto, the Repeal Agitation has been rather a superficial affair-a mere outside symptom of evils for which Repeal is not the appropriate remedy, and of wants which might have been appeased on terms far short of Repeal: it is now coming to be serious, profound, and real.

By this step, the government have committed what (seen from their point of view) is the tremendous blunder, of teaching Ireland to do without O'Connell. A year ago, it seemed as if O'Connell were indispensable to the Repeal Agitation. The probabilities of his life and health were then prime elements in every calculation having Ireland's future history for its subject-matter. He was more necessary to Ireland and Repeal, than Louis Philippe to the throne of the Barricades, or than Sir Robert Peel to his own sliding-scale. The period of his removal from the arena of politics, by death or the infirmities of age, has heretofore been looked forward to, with anxious apprehensions by one party, and hopeful confidence by the other, as a period of crisis and transition in Irish affairs; an important political event which would relieve British cabinets of the greater portion of their great difficulty, and seriously weaken the po

What has the government gained by imprisoning O'Connell What, by any possibility, can it gain? The judge, in dry judicial phrase, talks of crime and punishment, of example and prevention :-" We ought to consider the matter thus: A crime has been committed-a dangerous crime; it must be punished; it must meet with exemplary punishment-a punishment which will be like-pular and national cause. Of all such anxieties and

hopes, there is now, once for all, an end. For that critical period we have made a provision, of admirable aptitude, for all the uses of Repeal patriotism. The difficult and delicate problem of teaching Ireland to do without O'Connell, to agitate without the agitator, we have solved to a nicety. The difficulty was great-seemed almost to involve a contradiction in terms. It was, how to ensure the continuance of O'Connell's power after the cessation of his activity? how to train up fit successors for the great man during his lifetime, seeing that the great man spoke all the speeches, and did all the work himself, and was so great as to dwarf all other men into littleness. This difficulty we have met with unmatched dexterity. By locking up O'Connell in jail, for a year, we have prodigiously increased his influence; we have added tenfold to the power of his ideas, the authority of his opinion, the magic of his name; and yet, at the same time, and by the same act, we have made room for the independent activity of younger and less conspicuous men, whom his presence had cast into the shade, whom his absence emancipates from pupilage, whom his expe

ly to prevent the crime being committed again, by the same persons or by other persons." Unluckily, the Irish people cannot be brought to " consider the matter thus ;" and of the likelihood so pleasantly contemplated by the learned judge there are at present no signs. Strange if there were. The crime is not of the sort to which such exemplary punishment is applicable. The only exemplary punishment for the political crimes of a people like the Irish, in a high moral and patriotic mood, were a war of extermination. Let Englishmen and Scotsmen remember 1832: what Great Britain was then, Ireland is now. It would take the genius of a Cromwell and a Castlereagh together, to punish this order of crime in such a way as to prevent the likelihood of its "being committed again, by the same persons or by other persons." Repeal, meanwhile, goes on faster and more hopefully than ever. The fire of nationality burns, if not with so flaring and crackling a blaze as at Tara and Mullaghmast, yet with a fiercer and more concentrated heat. This imprisonment of O'Connell decides the hesitation of the waverers, clears the doubts of the doubters, and makes enthusiasts of the believers. It is a new ir-rience, however, will still continue to aid and guide. ritation of the most stinging sort, a new grievance and insult more intolerable than the Protestant Church itself, a new argument more cogent and intelligible than all the others together-needing neither logic nor rhetoric to set it forth against the possibility of getting justice for Ireland under the régime of Union and Imperialism. Repeal was an abstraction-it is now embodied and personified. The greatest and best-beloved man in all Ireland-the man for whom the millions pray every Sunday, before mass, as regularly as they pray for the Queen and the Prince, and the rest of the Royal Family-branded as a criminal, and immured in a Bride-sonality, that imperious will, which repressed and overwell, by the representatives of the alien law and the alien government !-a second summer of Monster Meetings and vituperative anti-Saxon harangues would have done the Union less harm than this. We have now "The Impolicy and Injustice of Imprisoning O'Connell.” solved the problem, "How to convey to such a people as By the Author of "Ireland and its Rulers."

Henceforth, then, O'Connell ceases to be indispensable to Ireland and Repeal. There will be no interregnum of anarchy in the Repeal ranks when the arch-agitator dies; no interruption in the line of succession. We have passed a most effectual Regency act: we have got the king of the Romans elected during the emperor's lifetime. In the empty presidential chair, the men of the Conciliation Hall have every thing of O'Connell that they really need—an ever-present memorial of his spirit, his principles, his political maxims, and his name; and they have these without that towering and domineering per

shadowed all men beside himself. Before losing O'Connell, Ireland has gained Smith O'Brien.

We regard the aspects of the Repeal Agitation now as | to certain items of his political creed. There is as much far more formidable and menacing than during the era of Theobold Wolfe Tone in these men, as of Daniel of the Monster Meetings. A spirit of business-like prac- O'Connell. On the "morality of war," they hold their ticality is growing up in the Repeal Association, more own opinions. The O'Connellite doctrine, that "Repeal perilous to British ascendency than even the Anti-Saxon is not worth purchasing at the price of one drop of human furor of Tara and Mullaghmast. They are doing a blood," is regarded as a crotchet of the great man's,-remore dangerous thing now than reviling us Saxons: spectable in him, but deserving no quarter when enunthey are imitating us-educating themselves and one ciated by unprivileged lips. Meanwhile they sink minor another into a most Saxon sturdiness of purpose, and differences; vote for keeping the peace until they are persistency of action. There is less oratory in the busi- better prepared for war, and watch the Oregon question ness than there was, and more of steady, working with a most lively interest. This war section of the activity; less Catholicism, and more nationality. At Repeal party are as patient, practical, and business-like the head of the movement is Mr. Smith O'Brien, a cool, a set of men as the pacific O'Brien section. They sensible, everyway trustworthy man, with most of neither gloss over the vices, nor flatter the vanities of O'Connell's best qualities, untainted by any one of his any portion of their fellow-countrymen. They can afford peculiar and characteristic faults; a tardy and reluc- a good-humoured, half-contemptuous smile at the patant convert to repeal-a Protestant, too—just the man triotic vagaries of the Monster Meetings-make no to win over to the repeal ranks accessions from that scruple of owning that Irishmen all lived too fast in the Protestant Liberal party whose neutrality or indiffer- summer of 1843-broadly hint that it was nonsense to ence has hitherto been the repealers' weak point. The speak Dungannon speeches, and vote Dungannon reso"Parliamentary Committee" of the Repeal Association lutions, without the Dungannon matériel of war-avow (Mr. Smith O'Brien's creation) is doing a great work in a strong distaste for "drums without soldiers,”—and a quiet way-training Irishmen to political knowledge, take no particular pains to draw the line exactly beand aptitude for political business; teaching their orators tween Repeal and Separation. We doubt whether the statesmanship, combining with the agitation for nation- British empire contains within its limits a set of more ality the collection and diffusion of useful knowledge- dangerous enemies to its integrity and power, (thanks the most useful knowledge-knowledge of the history, to Lords Lyndhurst and Stanley,) than this war section condition and resources, the fiscal, mercantile, agricul- of the Irish repealers. To have armed such men with a tural, and topographical statistics of their country. "The grievance like the imprisonment of O'Connell, is the greatest want of Ireland," said The Nation newspaper, worst thing the Tories have done for us yet. the other day," is knowledge:" "did the Irish middle classes know something of organisation, statistics, and topography, and had we a class of patriots who united an acquaintance with tactics and history to a thorough familiarity with the state and resources of Ireland, we never again should hear it said that Ireland's allegiance could be retained by force, or that her independence was impossible." The "greatest want" is in course of receiving a rapid and full supply. Franchise and Registration, Poor Laws, National Debt, Joint-Stock Banking, Commercial Tariffs, Landlord and Tenant Law, Taxation and Finance, Fisheries, Charitable Bequests, Prison Discipline, Ecclesiastical Courts, Jury Laws, Medical Charities, Police, Absenteeism, Colonisation, Public Works, Education, Church Reform, and Law Reform-these are the matters that busy the thoughts of the new school of Irish patriots. On some of these, careful and able Reports have already been published and extensively circulated; on others, inquiry is in progress. By the untiring acquisition and diffusion of every kind of political knowledge, the agitators are schooling themselves into legislators, and forming the resolute and enlightened public opinion which is, first, to achieve national self-existence, and afterwards to work out national prosperity.

We have mentioned The Nation newspaper. Are our readers acquainted with this new organ of the new spirit which has recently grown up in Irish politics? We assure them it is a sign of the times not to be neglected. The Young Ireland of which this journal is representative, is well worth being studied and understood by all Englishmen and Scotsmen. This Nation is not a mere O'Connellite, nor a mere Catholic organ. It has a life of its own. Its writers treat Catholicism with all due respect, as the religion of their country; but they do not write at all like Popish devotees: they venerate and love O'Connell, but do not seem to subscribe implicitly

How much of the mischief may even now be undone by the Euthanasia of the indictment in the House of Lords, it will be time enough to consider, should that devoutly-to-be-desired consummation be realized. In the meantime, we trust that the British people will not be slack or sparing in the expressions of their sympathy with a nation whose enemies are our enemies, whose wrongs are our wrongs,-only in a greatly aggravated form, and with other special ones of their own superadded, and whose zealous friendship in peace and war, is worth a thousand-fold more to us than the forcible and formal maintenance of any artificial political tie. We cannot lose too little time in making it clear to our rulers that we will not be accessary, either before or after the fact, to a war-whether of statutes or of bayonets-against a people who peacefully agitate for the redress of wrongs, the like of which we, of England and Scotland, would not endure for an hour. We heartily dislike Repeal, as a dividing and weakening of the empire, and a probable occasion of new jealousies and dissensions between the countries; but that most horrible of calamities, a war with Ireland, would divide and weaken the empire far more fatally than even the dissolution of the Legislative Union-would give us, instead of probable dissensions, certain permanent and deadly hatred. The case has not even yet, we believe, got beyond the reach of wise and honest imperial legislation. The misfortune is, that of honesty and wisdom imperial legislation gives no sign it is only within this past month that imperial legislation has again voted the perpetuity of that nuisance of nuisances, the Protestant Church Establishment. We take leave of this subject, for the present, with the expression of our conviction that, if Ireland is ever to be other than a drag on us in peace, and a fearful peril and weakness in war, she must have either Repeal, or that for which Repeal is sought -a free and vigorous national life, in church and state

a full development of her internal resources, and the weight and consideration to which she is entitled as a constituent portion of the British Empire.

On this side of the Channel, our free-trade politics are making all the way that can be expected, with a monopolist parliament and tenant-at-will constituencies. The League has lost-that is, has failed of gaining South Lancashire: but the League has a most invaluable talent for making present failure instrumental to future success, and turning the minority of to-day into the majority of to-morrow. That their first county contest has cut down some two-thirds of the oligarchical majority, may be taken as a sign that they are getting ready for the next general election, whenever it may come. For the present, Liverpool and Manchester are beaten out of the field by the free and independent electors of those great marts of national industry, Newton and Ormskirk: -a fact which tells on other controversies than that of free trade and monopoly. The League, as the League, meddles with no other question than its own; but it is silently accumulating materiale and paving the way for the labourers in the next agitation that will stir the heart of this country. Contests like this, in which industry and intelligence are swamped by the political serfdom of the dependants of the aristocracy, are of invaluable efficacy for exposing the rottenness of our electoral system, and the need of a new Reform Bill. To the advocates of an extended and protected suffrage, a South Lancashire election is worth six months of agi

tation.

monopoly, is deserving of all respect for the motives by which it is obviously actuated; but the inconsistency and self-contradiction of it are most egregious. Men who have, for years, been confidently proclaiming, with reference to the relative economical value of free and slave labour, the doctrine, that what is morally wrong cannot be politically or commercially right; who have loudly vaunted the superiority of wages to the whip as a stimulus to labour; who have spent half their lives in telling the world, that the labour of one free man is worth that of two slaves; seem now to have lost all faith in their own principles; and, in unnatural coalition with the men who used to deny that Negroes have souls, swell the monopolist cry for protection to the cheap and profitable industry, against the competition of the costly and wasteful. But we care little about this mere argumentum ad hominem. Who is consistent, or who is inconsistent, is a question of the smallest possible public concern. Looking at the matter merely with anti-slavery eyes, we take the broad and simple ground, that, by this policy of monopoly and exclusion, we do the worst possible injury to our own experiment of negro emancipation. In fact, we declare that experiment a failure, and do what we can to make it such. We teil all slave-owners and slave-traders throughout the world that our moral right was an economical and commercial wrong; that the fancied superiority of wages to the whip is found out to be a sheer delusion; that, after trying the two systems of slavery and anti-slavery, we find slavery decidedly the better of the two-so much the better that it is out of the question to think of competing with it. And, at the same time, we encourage our planters in a droning, dawdling, wasteful, careless way of managing their estates, which goes far to verify the miser

In Parliament, we have Sir Robert Peel still in the Free Trade groove, sliding, like his own scale, with long "rests" by the way. The doctrines of the Import-duties Committee of 1840, are making their own way de-able theory. There are many ways of annoying and injur spite of all obstructions. The minister who was set up specially to resist them, is stealthily working them out as fast as his sense of decorum permits. The Moabites of monopoly have got their Balaam, and he uses them most Balaam-like, blessing, in a small way, where he was hired to curse. By large words, and little deeds, we are quietly coming on :-in 1842, Improved Slidingscale, and New Tariff; last year, the famous ministerial utterances of "Free Trade in the Abstract," and the "Doctrines of Common-sense;" this year, the Woolduty Repeal, and the Free-labour-Sugar juggle. Thus, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe towards the maturity of our commercial and industrial emancipation. The monopolists take it, all things considered, pretty quietly -a kind instinct warning them that it is in vain to kick against the pricks. Even the Duke of Richmond bears these doses of Free Trade better than might have been expected. He yields, we may almost say gracefully, to the Peel ascendency; he talks no more about "making and unmaking ministries;" disclaims altogether being the "leader of the agricultural interest ;" mentions his fishmongering losses on salmon, more in sorrow than in anger; and thankfully accepts compensation for the same, in the shape of a provision for a younger brother at the Treasury.

The opposition which a portion of the Anti-slavery public by no means a majority, if the vote of the large Exeter Hall meeting may be taken as a criterion-con- | tinue to make to a relaxation of the West India sugar

ing the slave-owning and slave-trading nations; but there is only one way of abolishing slavery effectually, and once for all, throughout the world; and that is, to undersell slave labour in the open market of the world; to demonstrate, in fact, that which our philanthropists have so often demonstrated in logic-that free labour is the cheaper of the two. And this we can never do while a particle of the British West India monopoly remains in our commercial code; parent as monopoly is, not only of scarcity, dearth, and uncertainty, but of laziness, carelessness, stupidity, and wastefulness. Let down our West Indians easily, by all means (the vilified Whig Budget of 1841 would have left them a protection of 50 per cent.;) give them legisla tive facilities for the supply of their scanty labour-market; abolish all monopolies that injuriously affect them, and abridge their producing power. They have a clear right to every aid that our legislation can give them, to help them through difficulties in which our legislation has placed them. But to admit into our commercial policy the principle that free labour is naturally and intrinsically at a disadvantage in competition with slavelabour, is at once to give up the cause of abolitionism as a lost case. If we are ever to reform Cuba and Brazil, it must be, not by at once irritating their pride, and betraying our own jealousy of the superior advantages afforded by their" peculiar domestic institutions;" but by fairly beating them in open market: demonstrating in the price current that ours is a more excellent way than theirs, to cheap and gainful production.

Printed by WILLIAM TAIT, 107, Prince's Street.

TAIT'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

AUGUST, 1844.

BON GAULTIER AND HIS FRIENDS.-No. III.

"A moy n'est que honneur et gloire d'estre dict et reputé Box GAULTIER et bon compaignon: en ce nom, suis bien venu en toutes bonnes compaignies de Pantagruelistes."-RABELAIS, Prologue de premier livre.

SCENE.-The Interior of the Martello Tower, Leith-Box | him with the great Highland bagpipe locked in GAULTIER, YOUNG SCOTLAND, and CAPTAIN O'MALLEY at his passionate embrace, like a lover drawing table-THE THANE enters, dancing, with half-a-dozen divinest responses from its ivory lips.