The Sun.
London, England, 1833-04-01 00:00:00

MONTHLY REVIEW.

This stalwart nonagenarian—for the Monthly
is now some ninety years old and upwards—ex-
hibits few or no symptoms of decrepitude or im-
becility. It is in surprising good health for its

age. Its sagacity, too, and critical discernment
are as sound and unclouded as ever they were.
The reviews in the present number come recom-
mended to us by an apt and pertinent variety.
There are strong dishes for the lovers of stimu-
lants; light, delicate viands for the fastidious ;
slip-slop and water-gruel for those of weakly, in-
firm taste and judgment. We extract a passage
from an able review of the Irish Question :
" In turning over the page of history, we occasionally
meet with facts which stagger our belief, not from want of
confidence in the veracity of the historian, but because the
facts themselves are contrary to our notions of probability
--contrary to what we should have expected to take place
under the circumstances of the case. Much of the painfull
scepticism thus produced would be spared, if we would
endeavour to divest the events which we see passing
around us, of all that is adventitious or temporary in their
character, and view them in the light in which they will
appear to posterity. By accustoming the mind to this
process of abstraction, we shall soon become convinced
that many things do actually take place in the world, of
which probability cannot he predicated. Who, for ex-
ample, in after times, will unhesitatingly believe that Sir
Robert Peel, who had, during his whole previous public
life, strenuously opposed the measure of Catholic Emanci-
pation, as unconstitutional and unjust, and who owed his
political importance chiefly to that opposition, could be the
man who carried that very measure triumphantly through
the House of Commons, without becoming a convert to its
justice—without any motive of personal ambition—against
the opinion of a great class of the nation—and at the sa-
crifice alike of his character for consistency, and his credit
with the powerful party to which he belonged. Who, five
years ago, would believe this? Yet who now denies the
fact ? And by what arguments, drawn from probability,
will the scruples of some future profounder of historic
doubts be satisfied, when he demurs to the belief, that in
the epoch of 1833, the eighteenth year of profound peace,
Ireland, a third part of the empire, was, without any par-
liamentary inquiry—without even the pretence of a single
seditious movement—deprived of the benefits of the British
c'institution, and laid under martial law by an Administra-
tion consisting of men who had all their lives been ex-
cluded from office, solely for their attachment to constitu-
tional principles, and who had uniformly denounced mea-
sures of severity towards Ireland, not only as arbitrary
and cruel, but as the sure and certain way to increase the
very evils they were intended to remedy. In vain will the
anxious inquirer look for the cause of this startling phe-
nomenon. He will see nothing anomalous or unusual in
the state of Ireland to throw light upon it, and we think
his perplexity will he pretty nearly at a maximum, when
lie finds it recorded, as a justification of the government,
that it took this astounding leap over the barriers of ti e
constitution, in order that future governments might not
follow the example."
" But measures merely conciliatory, though good as far
as they go, will never reach the source of Ireland's evils—
she wants conciliation, but she wants something more.
If the patient has been blvd, and blistered, and tortured,
by ignorant quacks, the regalar practitioner may very pro-
perly commence his operations with an anodyne draught,
or an emollient ointment, to allay irritation ; but he will
not trust to these alone for the cure of a deep-seated and
inveterate distemper. The disease that preys upon the
vitals of Ireland is poverty—ahject, unmitigated poverty ;
this is the plague-spot that infects her constitution, and it
is here that the remedy must be applied in order to be
effectual : the people are goaded into crime by absolute
misery. _ _ _

" 'there is nothing in the history of any country, an-
cient or modern, savage or civilized,.to match the destitu-
tion of the inhabitant of the Irish hovel—compared to him
the meanest serf in Russia is a personification of comfort.
The land is split into innumerable fragments, not into acres,
but into roods; from each of these patches the peasant has
to extract subsistence for at least one family, an exorbitant
rent, and an iniquitous tithe. This he finds impossible—
it is not to he done by the power of man or angel. He
cannot supply the deficiency by the produce of his labour,
however willing he may be to work, for in this commo-
dity it is all supply and no demand—he can find no kind
" brother of the earth to give him leave to toil." In this
extremity he probably sets nut on a begging expedition at
home, or a summer excursion to England, where, by liv-
ing on potatoes, and sleeping in the open air, he outbids
the English labourer, whom he sends to the workhouse,
and whose place he takes in the field. When these pre •
carious expedients succeed, he is able to satisfy the rapacity
of his landlord, and save his naked family from absolute
starvation ; but when they fail, as they often do, he o
course falls into arrears; hie but is unroofed, and be is
driven out to find what shelter he may, in the bog, or on
the wild hill, and to moralize on the unequal distribution
of good and evil in this, our lower world. He here meets
with others as destitute as himself—the victims of the
same accursed system—with whom he is instinctively led
to unite himself. Confederacies are thus formed of men
smarting under a sense of cruel treatment, thirsting for
revenge, and rendered despera.e by want. Hence the
murders, turnings, and other atrocities which prevail to
such an extent and which are more frequent than formerly,
only because the people are more numerous, and their
means of subsistence less."