The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1844-12-17 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

THE EVILS THAT AFFLICT IRELAND.—Yes, Ireland is afflicted by evils, but those evils are created not so much by the defects of the law, or by the neglect and tyranny of the better classes, as by the total demoralisation of the lower. The Irish peasant, naturally brave, generous, and faithful, is by the system under which he is brought up, rendered cruel, merciless, and deceitful. There may be, and probably are, hardships inflicted by some of the landlords ; but they are produced in most instances by criminal and precedent acts on the part of the people. In no country in the world are the rights of property so ill understood or so recklessly violated : the industrious man fears to surround his cottage with a garden, because his fruit and vegetables would be carried off by his lazy and dishonest neighbours ; and he is deterred from growing turnips, which would add to his wealth, from the certain knowledge that his utmost care cannot preserve them. Amongst no people on the face of the earth are the obligations of an oath or the discharge of the moral duties so utterly disregarded : any man, the greatest culprit, can find persons to prove an alibi ; the most atrocious assassin has but to seek protection to obtain it. Where in the civilised world, but in Ireland, can you find a " sliding-scale" of fees for the perpetration of murder? And why is this so ? Because the religious instruction of the people has been totally neglected ; because their priests have become politicians, and stopping at nothing to accomplish their objects, they teach the peasantry by private precept and example to disrespect and disregard those doctrines which they publicly inculcate ; because their bishops, pitchforked from the potatoe-basket to the palace, become drunk with the incense offered to their vulgar vanity, and the patronage granted in return for their unprincipled political support, instead of checking the misconduct of the subordinates, stimulate them to still further violence, and stop at nothing which can forward their objects ; because the opinions of the people are formed on the statements and advice of mendicant agitators who have but one object in view, their own pecuniary aggrandizemest ; because a rabid and revolutionary press, concealing its ultimate designs under the praiseworthy and proper motive of affording protection to the weak, seeks to overturn all law and order, and pandering to the worst passions of an ignorant and ferocious populace, goads them, by the most unfounded and mischievous statements, to the commission of crime, and then adduces the atrocity of their acrs as a proof of the injustice of their treatment. Every murder is palliated, because it arises from the occupation of land." Every brutal assassination is paraded as " a fact" for Lord Devon, and is recommended to that nobleman's attention; not that the helpless and unoffending family of the victim may be afforded redress, but that the executioner of their parent may obtain commiseration. No matter what the conduct of the tenant may have been—no matter what arrears of rent he may have owed—to evict him is a crime, which, in the eyes of those unprincipled journalists, seems to justify an immediate recourse to " the wild justice of revenge." The rights of property are said to be guaranteed by the law—while the exercise of those rights is rendered impossible by the combination of unprincipled men, and the force of a morbid public opinion. He who would think it " monstrous" that a merchant should be debarred from the right of issuing execution against his creditor, shudders with horror at the idea of a landlord distraining for his unpaid rent. And the individual who delights in the metropolitan improvements, and glories in the opening of St. Giles's, though it drives thousands of " the suffering poor" at once and unrecompensed from their miserable abodes, considers the improvement of an Irish estate as too dearly purchased, if effected by the expulsion of one ill-conditioned and remunerated ruffian.—Blackwood.