The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1843-10-24 00:00:00

addressed to the editor of the Morning Chronic',

copied from the columns of that paper into the leading
journals of both parties, in England and in Ireland. We
may premise that the writer, whom we may assume to be
of whig politics, had, before entering upon his inquiry,
arrived at the conclusion, from a contemplation of affairs
in Ireland as represented in the public press, that the agi-
tation for repeal was " a gigantic piece of blarney on
O'Connell's part," kept up to save himself from pecuniary
ruin ; and that the object contemplated was, at the utmost,
the obtaining of an instalment of those measures which
he has been in the habit of clamouring for, as " Justice to
Ireland." His changed conviction, on visiting Ireland,
we give in his own words :

" It soon became apparent to me, after my arrival in
Ireland, that although this view of the case was perfectly
correct as far as O'Connell was concerned, the matter had
taken much deeper root. Other leaders beside O'Connell
either appeared on the stage, or skulked behind the scenes ;
and, above all, it was evident that the great mass of the
Roman Catholic peasantry had thoroughly taken the mat-
ter to heart. The people were bursting with repeal. It
was not in the least necessary to put searching questions
to them in order to get at their sentiments. You could
not make the commonest inquiry without bringing on a
repeal discussion. If you asked the price of pork or fish
in the streets, the old women were sure to say something
of this sort after they had answered your question

Well, sir, when are we to have our rights ? when will our
Parliament sit in College• green ?'
" The people, in short, were determined to have repeal
—by fair means, if possible—but, at any rate, repeal.
They had, moreover, fully made up their minds to the
sacrifices consequent upon a popular rising, and had fami-
liarised themselves to all the contingencies of an insurrec-
tion in an extraordinary degree. There was not a sinele
important point connected with the subject on which they
were not prepared with a good military answer ; and, in
whatever part of the country the question might be
asked, you were sure of receiving the same answer in
substance, and, generally speaking, in nearly the same
words. The last-mentioned circumstance proves to de-
monstration that the plans of operation with which the
heads of the peasantry were filled did not originate with
themselves, but that they had emanated from some com-
mon source, and were, in fact, the instructions of superior
minds, which had been carefully prepared to suit the exi-
gency of the case, and had been afterwards disseminated
by means of some established organisation among the
people."

To another paragraph we must direct attention, inas-
much as it shows that the labours of Father Mathew,
honest or not honest in intention, are at all events a part,
and an important one of the agitation for repeal. The
writer observes of the peasantry—

" If the rebellion of 1798 was spoken of, the remark
invariably made was to this effect Those days, sir,
were the days of drinking whisky. Our people lay drunk
in the ditches, and the troops obtained an easy victory.
But now we are a sober, temperate, and religious people.'
If I beard this remark once I heard it fifty times."

It has always been imagined that. ignorant and duped
with respect to this question as are the Irish people, they
could never hope to contend successfully against the dis-
ciplined troops which would be brought against them.
Such, however, it appears, as a successful stand in the
field, was never contemplated. The reply of the peasantry
to any remark upon this subject was usually to the follow-
ing effect :—" Oh, sir, you don't suppose we shall give
you the advantage of fighting a pitched battle with us?
We shall rise in our counties and baronies, and do all that
we want (which means making a clean sweep of the Pro-
testants) ; and when the troops arrive they will find the
people quietly at plough, and we shall be doing our work
elsewhere!" The military defences of the country ap-
peared to be regarded by them with cold contempt. They
declared that the walls of the barracks " would be scaled
in every direction by night, and that the people would
tumble over by thousands, and squeeze the troops to death,
if they did not take them out and throw them into the
river.'

Another circumstance, as to the ulterior views and ex-
pectations of the peasantry, we must give in the graphic
words of the writer :—" There is another horrible pre-
vailing idea, which really startled me the first time I
heard it. I was waiting for my car early in the morning
in the street of a small, sulky, ill-conditioned town, when,
seeing a farmer's wife setting up a potato-stall, I asked
her the price of her potatoes. She gave me a civil an-
swer ; but two men were standing by, one of whom said,
without my having previously addressed him, or having
made any remark calculated to encourage the observation,
We shall eat wheaten bread next year, sir.' I was really
unable to make out his drift, and told him good-humour.
edly that I was very glad to hear it, but begged to know
how the change would be brought about. There will be
fewer of us, sir,' was the reply. I then began to under-
stand his meaning, and, as I encouraged him to speak
them, that the land wasnot able to bear them,ihai:
1,000,000 or 2,000,000 might be spared with advantage
and that the country would be for the survivors. I after
w

ards heard the same idea, either in whole or in part, in
variety of forms; but the burden of the song always
was, ' Protestant and Catholic will freely fall, and the land
will be for the survivors.' "

It was a guerilla warfare which was looked forward to;
and the arms relied upon were the pike and such weapons
as are now used in their agrarian outrages. With respect
to the former, they reminded their catechist that " they
could be manufactured by any common blacksmith, in
large numbers, in the course of a day." The same reli-
ance upon the irregular mode of warfare accounts for the
fact that there has been less drilling, and other simi!ar
preparations for warlike movements, in Ireland, than has
ever been the case previous to any attempted insurrection
in any country.

A great reliance, too, was placed upon a presumed dis-
position of the army to join the contemplated insurrection.
"Three-fourths of the army" it was commonly observed,
" are Irishmen ; and every Irishman is a repealer." The
opposition of the Protestants of the North they depre-
ciated from the assumption that they would not stand by
their landlords. The writer of the letters, from which
we gather these facts, remarks—" on no one occasion did
I hear it slated that they could beat the Protestants of
the North. What they always said was that the Protes-
tants of the North would not turn out at the call of their
nobility and gentry.
It is a fact that the people never contemplated, except
as a last and very improbable alternative, going to war
for the object of their agitation. They relied upon
O'Connell's cunning and knowledge of the law to keep
them from a collision with the authorities; and only
dreamed of the necessity of resorting to violent measures,
if the government should interfere with the proposed as-
sembly of 300 gentlemen, who were to compose O'Con-
nell's illegal parliament. Such an interference would, un-
doubtedly, have been the signal for that war of extermi-
nation, which the Irish peasantry contemplated as the
the means of arriving at their end by violence.
Again recurring to the temperance movement and its
connexion with repeal, we are told that—" Although the
organisation of the temperance societies preceeded the re-
peal movement, that organisation has been adopted into
it. The congregation of earh Roman Catholic chapel
generally forms a temperance society. The repeal war-
dens are the officers, the temperance band—the members
of which ate dressed in uniform—are the rallying-point;
and w hen it is determined to show the strength of the
country, the male members of the temperance societies
are marshalled under their respective bands and colours,
and march out to the monster meeting. The people ap-
pear to take a pride in displaying their fixity of purpose
and the supposed moral excellence of their cause, by an
obvious abandonment of their previously habitual vices.
They feel ashamed when a drunken man appears reeling
in the streets, and I have seen them tebuke mendicants
whom they have observed in the act of importuning a
stranger. Intoxication is now rarely seen in Ireland. I
visited three crowded fairs, and did not see a single in-
stance of it; and I did not observe more than six or seven
drunken people all the time I was in Ireland."
The most serious phase of the state of feeling in Ireland
is the implication of the great body of the priesthood in
the agitation, and their contemplation of violence as the
means of working it out to a triumphant issue. The
priests of the old school, most of them of foreign educa-
tion, held themselves for a time aloof; but they were given
to understand that a loss of temporal comforts and spiri-
tual power would be the result of a perseverance in their
isolation ; and they ultimately submitted. The eleves of
Maynooth, however, most of them the sons of small far-
mers, and allied in feeling with the mass of the peasantry,
have entered into the agitation without hesitation, and
with determined resolution to rush to their purposes,
through all the risks and bloodsheds of a rebellion. The
feelings of this class are correctly represented by the fol-
lowing extractfrom the speech of the Rev. Mr. Cantwell,
parish priest of Trotnore, at the late monster meeting at
Listuore. " He'could support O'Connell with his voice ;
but he would support him with more. Look at that sun"
(said the rev. gentleman stretching forth his right arm).
After the magnificent scene I have this day witnessed,
I'll die a death, or see Ireland free." (Tremendous
cheering and waving of bats.) '1 his disposition of the
priesthood has given the repeal movement all the weight
of a religious cause in the eyes of a supersltious people ;
and furnishes a clue to the causes of that excitement,
which Englishmen and the world have always set down
as resulting from a disposition to be gulled by mingled
folly and knavery. By this interference and agency, the
organization of the people has been rendered complete.
After service every Sunday the priest puts oft' his sacred
character and assumes that of the demagogue. The
women and children are sent out of chapel, and the men
are lectured on political subjects for hours together.
"The primary object of the p
Church; but they
writer
objects
eire
of
hese of
letters
et
fhtu
is,s doeos cdr
doubt
bo ebdt btyo le
ei t
the temporalities of the Established
b h I r and
f ieland,
wotestanttosucceed,
have also a further object, which lies
Everybody in the south on
insurrection ere
t much
.n.earer their
heart, which is to make Ireland a Catholic country'

EatdOlie, admits that if

.;:nnetti the rebellion be