TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IRELAND. • THE House of Commons has been engaged nearly the whole of the week in discussing Irish affairs. All the interesting and important subjects in which England, Scotland, and the Colonies are concerned, have been kept in the background, and not even alluded to by more than two or three members. If some panacea for Irish grievances had been discovered,—if a prospect even had been held out of some permanent relief being afforded to the afflictions of our Sister Isle—we should not grudge the time which has been occupied in her concerns. But the fact is, that we have not, after the most careful perusal of all that has been said on the subject, learned a single new fact or gained one new idea from the display of Parliamentary eloquence and verbosity with which the week has been taken up.
The case of Ireland may be shortly stated. She has been oppressed and plundered for cehturies ; she has groaned under a horrid system of ecclesiastical tyranny, and been cursed with a reckless, unfeeling, necessitous race of landlords. Her starving population is fearfully demoralized ; and murders, burnings, and robberies are matters of almost daily occurrence in every county. It is admitted on all hands, that every possible means should be 'taken to put an end to this shocking state of things. And the qnestion which Parliament had to consider was, whether a recurrence to those arbitrary measures which have been so frequently resorted to, but hitherto always in vain, was now likely, fbr the rSt time, to render the people of Ireland more peaceable, moral, and'aubmissive, than they are at present. It may be said that remedial measures were promised. True, they were so; but the Representatives of the People are not justified in voting away, even for a month, the liberties of their constituents, which they were elected to protect, upon the mere promises of any set of Ministers.
We have not seen in the speeches of the Ministers and their partisans one particle of evidence to prove that the additional measures of coercion which are called for will have the slightest effect in allaying Irish discontent. How should they ? Will they remove a single grievance? Will they give employment and wages to the idle, or a legal provision to the famished poor? 'Will they convert the Catholics to a love of the Protestant Establishment? Will they conciliate O'CONNELL and the Repealers? If the proposed measures will produce no such effects, what can be their end or design ? It is, much easier to foretel what their effect will be. They will, if that be possible, add to the mass of hatred which the Church of Ireland even now finds insupportable. They will exasperate the People still more against their secular Rulers, and postpone to a still more distant period that much-talked of pacification of Ireland, which we begin to fear is almost an unattainable blessing.
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