The Sun.
London, England, 1866-10-19 00:00:00

Mr. Pope Hennessy at Wexfo.d.

At a large meetindin the Town-hall, Wexford,
Mr. Pope Hennessy, the candidate for the county,
delivered a long address, which was well received.
In the course of it he said—Men of Wexford, your
enthusiastic reception convinces me that though we
may have been heretofore personally unacquainted,
we have not been politically unknown to each other.
Indeed, if I may judge from what has occurred even
since I entered this crowded hall to-night, and from
what took place to-day in the Manse-house, I would
venture to say that no one can again describe me
as a stranger to the constituency of Wexford. The
three-and-twenty priests who were assembled a few
hours ago at the Manse, though I never saw a single
one of them before, welcomed me as a familiar
friend, and seemed to have as intimate a knowledge
of my public career as I have myself. In the same
way, I cannot be a stranger to certain Conservative
landlords, who have been canvassing for me very
actively—(cheers)—but who never saw me, and
whom I never saw. Therefore, I shall assume the
privileges not of an acquaintance merely, but of an
old friend, and talk to you frankly. Now, you have
met here in the discharge of the highest political
duty you can perform, that is—to resolve who shall
be your second representative in the House of Com-
mons; and there never has been on your part a more
critical moment for such a resolution—a more cri-
tical moment, I maintain, looking both to the pre-
sent condition of Ireland and to the present state
and prospects of political parties. What is the con-
dition of the country ? Prostrate in the dust, poli-
tically and materially. (Cheers.) You have heard,
no doubt, till you are sick of it, that all our misfor-
tunes are due to three bad years; but I attribute the
lamentable condition in which we are to 20 bad years,
and 20 extremely bad years they have been—l mean
the 20 years of almost unbroken Whig rule. (Loud
cheers.) Lord John Russell began these 20 years at
the time of the famine, when his gross neglect occa-
sion wide spread misery and desolation ; he termi-
nated them the other day, leaving Ireland in a state
of wide-spread disaffection ; during the whole period
he has been consistent in misgovernment and failure.
(Cheers.) When he took office 20 years ago our po-
pulation was eight millions and a half. Where is
that population now? Dwindled down to five mil-.
lions. (Cries of " Down with the Whigs.") Fortu-
nately for us that has been done already, t hey are
down—(cheers)—aud we must keep them down.
(Loud cheers.) Even ten years of Whig rule carries
a terrible lesson--let me remind you of its results in
this county. In ten years the population of the
county of Wexford declined from 180,000 to 144,000.
You will estimate the nature of this loss if you will
suppose this town rendered utterly destitute—your
population of 11,600 swept away—the town of New
Ross silent and deserted, the town of Enniscorthy
with roofless houses and not a human being to be
seen, the town of Gorey also totally destroyed—in
other words, the four chief towns of this county no
longer in existence. If you imagine such a picture,
you will see something even less than the reality of
desolation which was spread over the county during
those ten years ; for the four towns include only a
population of 26,000, whereas the actual loss has
been 36,000. When we remember what Adam
Smith says, that population is the source of la-
bour, and that labour is the source of wealth,
we can appreciate how seriously this must have

crippled our material resources. (Cheers.) But the
material view is the lowest ; we must not forget the
severance of family ties and heart-breaking pangs
involved in the emigration which carried away those
multitudes. To the injury thus received from the
Whigs they added the insult of publicly applauding
the exodus of the people ; one of our poets, Oliver
Goldsmith, has said—
" 11l fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
"Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
"No, no," said the Lord Lientenaut, "that is ex-
actly the kind of land Ireland should become. Let
men decay, and let us have horned cattle and sheep
in the place of them." The Whig Cabinet took
the same tone. " Drive the human beings away to
America ; send in cows and oxen ; make Ireland a
silent pasture-farm for feeding the manufacturers of
England." When I moved a resolution expressing
the regret of the House of Commons at the decline
of the Irish population, and trusting that the Go-
vernment would, by giving reproductive employ-
ment, endeavour to keep the people at home, every
member of the Whig Government voted against
me. On our side we had some Irish members and
the Conservatives who were in the house at the
time of the division—such men as Lord Cran-
bourne, a leading member of the pr sent Cabinet;
Sir Stafford Northcote, the present President of
the Board of Trade ; Lord John Manners, a most
faithful friend of Ireland—(cheers)—and also a
member of the present Cabinet. But, infinitely
more important than the generous conduct of these
statesmen when in opposition, is the declared policy
they have adopted on this, the paramount ques-
tion with us, since they have assumed the respon-
sibility of power. Mr. Disraeli not long since,
speaking in his own county to a number of English-
men, said the state of Ireland should receive the
first consideration of Government. (Cheers.) He
differed with the Whigs on this subject of emigra-
tion ; he avowed that he deplored it sincerely ; that
he did not regard it as a healthy depletion, but as a
fatal hemorrhage, a hemorrhage which should be
checked; and he undertook that the Government
would devise measures to stop it. Now, of course,
he does not intend to lay an embargo upon
emigrant ships, or by forcible means to retain the
people, but he can carry out his policy, if he thinks
fit to do so, by legislation which will encourage re-
productive labour and give security to the tenant--
(cheers) —and I presume there can be little doubt
but he will do this, provided be and his friends re-
ceive anything like fair play. Heretofore a Conser-
vative Administration never was allowed in our time
any opportunity of carrying beneficial measures for
Ireland, for it was hardly in office when it was turned
out again. Even thesfact that they laid upon the
table of the house a tenant-right bill, which is now
universally admitted to be the best bill of the kind
ever introduced, and a bill which would have satis-
fied the tenants completely, and kept hundreds of
thousands of farmers from crossing the Atlantic, in
spite of this the Conservatives received no mercy at
the hands of many Irish members, who joined the
powerful Whig phalanx, and threw the tenant-right
bill overboard, for the purpose of restoring the
enemies of their country to office. (Cheers.) Is that
fatal policy to continue ? Has not the time come
when Irish members should give the Conservatives an
opportunity of developing and enforcing the saving
policy they have proclaimed with respect to Ireland ?
( Cheers.) Not content with approving and promoting
the decline of the population, the Whigs made it a
practice to sow discord between class and class and

fan the flame of religious animosity. To set tenants
against landlords, to set Catholics against Protes-
tants, to keep us disunited and therefore powerless for
any national good, has been their invariable practice.
(Cheers.) They promoted men to the highest seats,
of justice who traded for years upon these miserable,
these fatal dissensions. One of the ablest men upon
the bench in this country—one indeed who for astute-
ness and tact as a politician, for eloquence, and for
a very high order of ability, is not excelled upon the
bench either in England or Ireland—distinguished
himself, up to the very brink of office, by the com-
munistic doctrines he uttered in setting the tenants

against the landlords. He delighted in telling the
people that the real evil of Ireland was the posses-