The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-01-04 00:00:00

NATIONAL TRANSGRESSIONS.-NATIONAL
CALAMITIES.

There is nothing, says Blackwood's Magazine, in
historical experience to forbid the idea, that peculiar
nations may have been appointed to separate purposes.
If to ancient Greece was almost exclusively given the
intellectual advancement of the world ; if to ancient
Rome was as exclusively the preparative discipline for its
government; there can be no doubt that to Judea was
assigned the guardianship of religion. The process may
be diversified in later times ; but the principle may re-
main. The rapidity with which the derelictions of duty
in Judah were followed by punishments declaredly divine,
finds a memorable counterpart in the annals of England,
even down to the present hour. But we shall limit our-
selves to the evidence in Ireland ; and on this point we
shall be as brief as possible. In the latter part of the
seventeenth century, Popery, hitherto kept down, became
suddenly triumphant in Ireland, and began its habitual
system of severity to the heretic. Confiscation and exile
swept away the rights of Protestantism. The result was
the national punishment by the scourge of civil war, a
renewal of conquest, the expatriation of the Romish
army, and the decay of all the sources of national pros-
perity. Another era came. Under the government of
Protestantism the country had recovered, privileges were
successively awarded, and it enjoyed the peace and gradual
opulence which belonged to English government. But,
a parliamentary faction at length allied itself with Popery ;
parliament was subdued by clamour, or seduced by popu-
larity, and the Popish population obtained tI
franchise. The elections instantly became

he elective
scenes of

national iniquity. Perjury was scarcely less than a pro-
fession, and that notoriously ruinous system of " sub-
letting," which has covered Ireland with pauperism,
became general, for the sole object of multiplying votes.
This was followed by the foundation of Maynooth, a col-

lege expressly formed for the training of a Popish priest-
hood, whose tenets, every man who had voted for this
foundation had sworn to be " superstitiousand idolatrous."
But, when did faction care what it swore ? The cup was
now full. The priesthood of Maynooth had scarcely
begun to learn their trade when vengeance fell upon
Popery and the Parliament. Instead of the promise of
gratitude, which had been so ostentatiously given by the
Popish associations, and so ostentatiously echoed by Par-
liamentary Liberalism, the first act of the Popish pea-
santry was to take up arms ; a rebellion of the most
treacherous and bloody nature broke out, in which the
murder of Protestants was perpetrated in cold blood, and
with the most horrid atrocity, Ireland was convulsed and
impoverished, the rebellion was extinguished and punished
by the sword, and at the cost of ten thousand peasant
lives. The next blow was on the feeble and fractious
Parliament. The Irish Legislature was extinguished at a
blow; and its fall was as ignominious as it was judicial.
Its national pride and acknowledged talent gave way with-
out a struggle, and with scarcely a remonstrance. It had
already lost the respect of the nation. The mind of Ire-
land disdained the deliberations which had suffered the
dictation of a mob. Parliament, existing without national
honour, perished without national sympathy. Its own
principle was retaliated on itself. The Papist sold it, the
Borough-monger sold it, the Protestant sold it, not for
the baser bribe of the populace, but for the prospect of
peace ; it was given over to execution, with the calm
acquiescence of a sense of justice, and tossed on the
funeral pile amid a population which danced round the
blaze. Popery now talks of its restoration. It is im-
possible. The very idea is absurd. As well might the
ashes of the dead be gathered and reshaped into the
living man. As well might the vapours of the swamp be
purified by filling it with the fire-damp. Every hour,
since that time, has made the country still more unfit for
legislation, more furious and inflammable. As well might
the nakedness of the people be covered by rags, reeking
with the pestilence. We rejoice to escape from the sub-
ject. It can be no gratification to us to trace the pro-
gress of disease through the political frame which it first
enfeebles, and then makes a source of contagion. We
have no love for the history of an hospital, or those fright-
ful displays of a " surgeons' ball," where every skeleton is
connected with public crime, and where science is demon-
strated from the remnants of the scaffold. But, it is
notorious that the morals even of the Irish peasant have
been degraded in the exact proportion of his rise in poli-
tical power. Every favour of the English Parliament,
from the beginning of the century until the fatal year
1829, only furnished him with an additional weapon, to be
used with more seditious violence. In that yew-, the
British Legislature was thrown open to him, and he
entered it in a barbarian triumph. From that moment,
England and Ireland were sufferers alike. In England,
Irish faction was an insolent mercenary, which opened
and alternately hired its services to both sides alike. In
Ireland it was a ferocious rebel, which, as the notorious
preparative for broader hostilities, exercised its arms in
midnight murder. At length the final endowment of
Maynooth came ; and, as an establishment, solely for the
Romish priesthood, without any admixti,-e of the laity,
and allowing the means of an increase in the number of
those pupils of Rome, and propagators of Romish doc-
trines, from about five hundred to double the number,
was fixed on the empire for ever, taken wholly out of the
further del heist:on of the legislature, and confernd, to
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