Ireland has not been regenerated by adversity, if we may
trust the signs of the day. The organized, secret, and incompre- hensible agitation which is going on in some parts, with no other apparent aim than that of keeping up an alarm, and so harassing the soldiery and constabulary, appears to mean at least that the indigenous Irish are returning to their old pursuit—to that sort of association in a beggarly conspiracy, which is as much a sport as a business for theIrish character. Perhaps it is only a diversion in favour of the very general movement among tenants to evade payment of rents by running away with the crops. The Nation, which has views of its own, puts forth a composition painting the undoubted distress in colours of exaggeration • returning to its old hint that the crops of Ireland must be kept at home to feed the People of Ireland ; and, by implication, winking at this Anti- Rent movement.
The Nation hints, but not unreservedly, a recantation of its former antagonism to the priests. The editor confesses that O'Con- nell was right in making the priesthood the instrument of his isgitatione, and parades the avowal of Mr. Thomas Meagher, that "if our country," Ireland, " is to have a new birth to liberty, she must be baptized, this time, in the old holy well." A calcu- lating religiosity, of a' candour so transparent that one hesitates to determine whether it can be effrontery or naiveté. But the demoralization is not confined to the Roman Catholic side: Mr. Beers, the Orange Magistrate of Dolly's Brae celebrity, has published a letter at once melancholy and ludicrous. By the easy process of an unqualified partisanship, he represents the idle faction-fight as a pure visitation on unoffending martyrs ; thus supplying a magisterial counterpart to the lowest Irish bra- vado. If such are the "gentlemen" of Ireland, such her teach- ers, how can we wonder at her people ?
