The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-08-01 00:00:00

INSURANCE OF CAPITAL SUMS,

The Directors are prepared to receive applications for Poli-
cies, which, though available for many other purposes as well,
will have the effect of rendering Property held under Lease for
years equivalent to Freehold for all purposes of mortgages or
investment. The following Table will afford
specimens or the Premium for the Insurance of .tlooo,payable
after the lapse of a given number of years.

---
Years. Rate. Years. Rate. I Years. Rate.
s. d. s. d. .t° s. d.
99 1 16 8 60 6 10 0 4O 13 17 6

AGENCIES.—The Directors are prepared to receive applica-
tions for Agencies in Towns and districts in which appoint-
ments have not yet been made. No application will be attended
to unless accompanied with unexceptionable references.
-SWINTON BOULT, Secretary to the Company.
=NJ.. HENDERSON, Resident Secretary .in London.

IRISH GRIEVANCES AND THEIR REMEDY.

(From the Dublin University Magazine for August.)

CAUSES OF TIIE MISERY OF IRELAND.

The questions that press upon us are, to what is it that
our misery is to be ascribed, and what are the means of
its alleviation ? To answer these questions honestly, we
must be careful to distinguish between a remote and im-
mediate cause ; and looking at our condition fairly, and
in a candid spirit, we are forced to avow that our present
degradation is in so great an extent attributable to our-
selves, that any other causes that may have occurred sink
into utter insignificance. It is to the indolence, improvi-
dence, and ignorance, which has uniformly pervaded, at
least, three provinces of Ireland, that we must unhesita-
tingly ascribe our present degraded condition. To what
this indo'ence, improvidence, and ignorance are to be as-
cribed is, as we have said, a distinct consideration • but it
is its existence that has degraded us. We admit that the
landlords of Ireland have, of late years, become, in a
great measure, alive to the responsibilities which the pos-
session of property entails, and to the necessity for ex-
ercising an active and vigilant control over its manage-
ment. The improvement in the upper classes is yet very
imperfectly developed, and is of very recent date. It is
thwarted and impeded, notwithstanding the best inten-
tions on the part of very many of the present race of
landlords, by the circumstances in which they find them-
selves placed. involved as they are, and rendered utterly
powerless by a load of incumbrances created by their pre-
decessors, who have, indeed, a heavy account to answer
for, for the grievous perversion and abandonment of the
trusts that were confided to them. A still more respon-
sible, because with the Irish peasantry a more influential
body, the Roman Catholic priesthood are still more hea-
vily accountable for the condition of the country. The
faults of the landlords were chiefly those of neglect—those
of the Roman Catholic priesthood are crimes of the most
deliberate commission. They have in every way per-
verted and desecrated the duties of their sacred calling.
Ir.structors of their sacred flocks, they have studiously
kept them in ignorance; ministers of the gospel, they
have sown rancour, hatred, and malevolence, against
their Protestant rulers and fellow-subjects, as widely as
they could disseminate it. There are, and always have
been, some few bright and holy exceptions—exceptions
the brighter and the nobler, because that, acting from a
sense of right, they have placed themselves in opposition
and hostility to the opinions and practices of their fellows,
the surest test of a brave and good man •, but the great
bulk of the Roman Catholic priesthood have ever been
ready to head an insurrection in the field, or to stimulate
to outrage even from the altar. And up to this very hour
how few of them are to be found in the disturbed districts
of Ireland, who avail themselves of the unquestionable
control which they possess over their people, to suppress
those cold-blooded and revolting enormities, which have
brought such infamy upon the land. Could these con-
tinue, if universally opposed by the priesthood ? "My
unaltered opinion,' said that unflinching statesman, Lord
Clare, some fifty years ago, " is, that so long as human
nature and the Popish religion continue to be what I
know they are, a conscientious Popish ecclesiastic never
will become a well-attached subject to a Protestant state,
and that the Popish clergy must always have a command-
ing influence on every member of that communion."
Intelligence and independence will abate or destroy this
influence ; but so long as ignorance and poverty abound,
-this influence will prevail, and the continued turbulence
and discontent of Ireland will confirm the justice of Lord
Clare's prediction.