military force, and a trifling system of taxation; and yet
this simple and cheap government, if menaced with invasion
from abroad, would find an army of citizens that would
perish on the shores of their country, rather than bend their
necks to the yoke of those foreign despotisms, by which a
large proportion of the people of Europe have been so long
deprived of just and equitable institutions.
I have the honour to be,
Sire,
With undissembled attachment to Your Majesty's person
and interests,
Your Majesty's most devoted, most faithful,
And most candid Servant and Subject,
A. ATKINSON
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. 91
A REVIEW OF THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES ;
Including a Critique upon Cobbett's Reformation, and an impartial Review of
the Character and Capabilities of O'ConnelL
In Ireland, the press and the parties are the counter-parts
of one system of music ; very jangling music to he sure, in the
ears of those who have a taste for moral harmony ; hut still
deeply divine in the sensorium of our country ; and doubly
deep in that of every administration intending to govern
Ireland by the maxim " Divide et impera," as in days of
yore ! However, it is not the British Government that are
to blame for this system, so much as the Irish themselves.
The high church Tories, having had their chops so long and
so sweetly buttered with the oil of rape and the juice of
parsnips, (and if these gentlemen do not know how to butter
their parsnips with good places, and to reap their tithe from
the green fields of Erin with an oppressive hook, there is
no truth in history,) plants which flourish in Irish tithe-
lands, and close boroughs, beyond any other tract of soil in
that divided country ; and for the richness of their flavour,
and the quantity of their produce, without any parallel even
in the horticultural history of the heavenly bodies ! These
gentlemen, we say, with their sons and cousins, having
grown fat upon the oil and the parsnips of their church and
their boroughs, in proportion as the land grew poor by the
attraction of too large a measure of its nutritive powers to
the growth and perfection of their plants, did not wish to
withdraw their tongues from their long-established and deli-
cious function of lapping up the oil upon their palates, and
within and without their cheeks; and consequently they
became extremely wroth, and sung out most discordant
notes, when they found the doors of the legislature thrown
open to the very men whose farms had been exhausted and
reduced to nothing by the absorbing power of their plants.
Instead, however, of giving up, as all wise men would, to
the claims of justice, and the public good (to say nothing of
the sound policy of preserving their own valuable family
92 IRELAND,
estates, and all their just and reasonable privileges,, whole
and entire) plants that had proved so pernicious both to their
church and to their country, they renewed the cry of WAR
when the roots of their monopoly were touched ; they sounded
the tocsin aloud, concentrated their forces in Dublin and
the north, and harangued the Protestant populace in basses,
quavers, tenors, and counter-tenors of all tones and mea-
sures : and although O'Conuell pleaded for their life interest
in the rape and the parsnip, and offered to them the right
hand of fellowship, and pronounced the orange to be a very
good colour, and the Boyne water a rich mellow tune, and
even ordered his men to fire a feu-de-joie round the statue
of King William III. ; yet all would not do ; " the fellow,"
said they, " was educated for a priest, and is a Jesuit in his
heart ; his object is to overthrow England and the Protestant
religion, and to make a tool of the Irish Protestants in that
holy warfare ; and all this though he knows in his heart that
Popery is a d d imposition ; and, if the truth were known,
would much rather be tried for his life by honest and intel-
ligent Protestants, than by a jury of his own profession in
the city of Madrid." To this effect do the high church
Tories think and speak of O'Connell, and thus do they fight
for the preservation of the rape and the parsnip, whole and
entire, instead of uniting with their countrymen, heart and
hand, in demanding a regeneration of that political system,
under which ignorance, poverty, discord, deadly prejudices,
the ruin of Irish manufactures, the absentee system, draining
the country of its life-blood, the oppression of the Irish
labourer, the horrible spread of mendicity, the murders,
burnings, and savage factions of the west and south, and
the party battles of the north, have been, one and all, gene-
rated, reared, and brought into action ; and notwithstanding
that if this system should continue to the end, even Catholic
estates in the South of Ireland would be of little value;
Protestant estates of still less ; Ireland, instead of being the
right arm of England, would be her curse and thorn ; and
should an ambitious power, or a union of such powers as
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. 93
those of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, alight upon our shores,
in any conflict of the Nations But here we shall draw a
veil over the violation of our peaceful homes by a ferocious
foe, or the conversion of our fields of fertility into fields of
slaughter. The evils which afflict our country are sufficient,
without drawing upon the horrors of a foreign invasion, or
the ravages of a barbarous enemy, alike indifferent to our
quarrels and our claims. The existence of two opposing
parties in this country has been its curse. It has arrested
the progress of improvement. It has enabled England to
oppress us, and Scotland to pass us by in the march of trade.
It has sold the political independence of the country, by
which alone her commercial interests could be promoted
and secured. It has made us a mere tool in the hands of
religious and political Quacks, who profit by our ignorance
and credulity. In a word, it has left us a poor, beggared,
bankrupt, barbarous Nation of wicked, superstitious, and
oppressed slaves; and to this portrait, the educated, the
intelligent, and the virtuous, are the sole exceptions, and in
comparison of the nation, these, we fear, are but a small
number. It is not a temperate rational warfare, (like that
which Scotland, a united and enlightened nation, recently
exercised in her pursuit of constitutional reform) that marks
our course. It is a war embittered by religious hatreds, by
clerical jealousies, by monopolies to be lost or won, by
oppressions felt and painfully remembered, by Antichristian
impositions of the high church, upon the one hand ; and by
foreign connection, and disgraceful corruptions of Christia-
nity, obstinately adhered to by the low church, upon the
other. These are the deep sources of Irish discord ; most or
all of which might be removed by a free conference of the
parties, if that conference were entered into in a spirit of
Christian charity, and with a firm determination to prefer the
interests of truth, of their country, and of justice, to those of
falsehood and imposture ; of monopoly, anarchy, and blood.
But to the shame of the Protestant high Tories be it said,
that in the work of conciliation, in the Christian virtue of
94 IRELAND,
forbearance ; and above all, in a patriotic pursuit of justice
for their country ; even O'Connel, the prince of agitators,
has left them far behind, Are we O'Connell's slaves ?
Do we bow before a foreign altar ? Do we owe him any
debt of gratitude ? Yes, we owe him the debt of gratitude
due to such personal incivilities as we never received from
men of the first rank and distinction in the state. Do we
know the source of these incivilities ? No matter we scorn
them and their source together; we trample them under
foot ; and when we write upon our country, we shall do it
independently and without prejudice, as we have always
done. And without imputing to O'Connell that purity of
motive which .angels feel, or that perfection of judgment
which is their attribute ; without asserting that he is free
from high ambition or from low resentments, or from selfish
interests and prejudices, the worst of all ; we maintain that
(with all his faults) he has proved so far faithful to his coun-
try's claims; and that he is just such a man as Ireland
requires at the present crisis; cool, constitutional, well
informed, rich in experience, and in the resources which she
supplies ; steady, persevering, and patriotic ; and from his
superior knowledge of the law, fit to guide the bark of his
country over that stormy sea of civil oppression and political
discontent, on which she has been long embarked ; although
we are not ignorant that in the discharge of his duty as the
pilot of the vessel, he has sometimes exercised a despotism
towards virtuous and unbending spirits (witness his conduct
towards the amiable and unfortunate Clayton, of Galway,)
that clearly evinced he had not arrived at that point of men-
tal illumination, or rather perhaps of religious and political
independence, in which he could afford to let justice triumph
at the expense of priestcraft, his working tool. Or if his
treatment of Clayton, who had become a Protestant, and his
vindication of the conduct of the Galway priests in that
family transaction (and we have known some Methodist
preachers of the high church party in Ireland guilty of a
similar offence, thus proving a principle which we have often
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. })5
advanced, that Priestcraft is the same in all churches.) If
these proceedings of his, we say, in reference to Clayton,
were really the offspring of a religious or educational bias,
we must only conclude, if the doctrine of Purgatory be true,
that its fires have not yet purged the bigoted soul of the
patriot from its last stains of prejudice ; and the worst of all
prejudices in a catalogue of the corruptions of the heart,
that which takes its rise from a zeal for God and his church ;
as if the former could be glorified, and the latter honoured
by acts of injustice to our brethren, and by taking for the
guide of our conduct, the most imbittered and criminal of all
those unholy passions which have taken up their abode in
the human heart.*
* In reference to this affair of Clayton, (who, when he hecame a Protestant,
was ejected from the embraces of his family by Popish bigotry, cultivated
by Galway priests,) and some other acts of Mr. O'Connell, that, as private
acts, would not bear to be tried by the aquafortis of that golden rule,
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,'*
&c. ; as also in reference to the use which he is supposed (by some) to make
of such political institutions as derive their existence from his personal
influence acting upon popular feeling ; and which, in opposition to him,
could obtain no lasting position on the soil of Ireland. In reference to the
use which he makes of these, and to the ascendancy which he maintains in
them, it may perhaps be said, in vindication of his occasionally partial and
despotic conduct, that in the peculiar circumstances of Ireland, he could
not conduct his country out of her present distresses into her former pros-
perity, without placing the political institutions of that country, as far as
possible, under his own personal control, and enlisting the priesthood of the
people effectually in his cause; and to this end he might deem it justifiable
to put down every individual, however upright, or however well founded his
particular complaint, who should presume to lay a finger (as Clayton did)
upon any part of that machinery, by the working of which, he proposes to
restore his country to that state of prosperity in which she stood prior to the
Act of Union, agreeable to that well-known maxim of certain politicians
and divines, " The greater good justifies the lesser evil."
This is perhaps the best apology that can be offered for O'Connell's treat-
ment of Clayton, and some other acts of a similar description ; and if, in
a moral point of view, they cannot be justified, the mere politician will regard
it as an extenuation of their guilt, if not a vindication of their necessity,
that the end justified the means ; and we need hardly state, that although
a man actuated by motives of Christian virtue, may embark on the sea
of European politics for the public good, yet over that sea he will never
96 IRELAND,
In pressing towards the mark of TRUTH, we do not
believe that any Protestant of our stamp will receive justice
conduct his bark to the place of its destination, with this principle for his
pilot; although his own soul may be conducted to a happier port; for
Europe is not like Pennsylvania, when William Penn colonised it with a
company of such honest and virtuous men as our quarter of the world is not
likely soon to produce again for a similar purpose. It is much more like a
nest of cunning sharpers, each labouring, by plot and intrigue, to outwit the
other, and to carry into operation their respective views, without yielding to
anv foolish scruples (for such they regard them) as to the crimes that must be
committed in the working of their favourite scheme to that placid and pros-
perous conclusion which they always contemplate !
This being the state of Europe, we need not look for more virtue in
O'Connell than in other men, notwithstanding that he was educated for a
priest and indeed if we take a retrospective view of those characters who
are recorded on the page of history, even as instruments of the most dis-
tinguished revolutions in the cause of human liberty, we shall not find many
of them adhering, like William Penn, to the strictest rules of Christian
morality in their laws and public proceedings ; nor returning, like Wash-
ington and the Roman Cincinnatns, to the cultivation of their family farms,
after splendid victories ; nor with Tiberius Gracchus, denouncing that man
as a vicious citizen who could not live upon seven acres of land ! Oh no,
we do not look for such examples of stern morality in these days of Europe ;
for although she has still her patriots, thank Heaven, and many too ; yet
these excellent men do generally wish to be well rewarded for their services
(which no doubt they deserve to be) ; and hence when we thank God that the
Duke of Wellington conquered Buonaparte, and that Dan. O'Connell rose
up to procure justice for Ireland, we do not tarnish their laurels with the
liberal rewards with which their country has crowned them ; nor dwell with
fastidious particularity upon the affairs of Marshal Ney, or the fibs of O'Con-
nell, in a burst of gratitude for the services which they have rendered to
their country, in their struggles with the despotism which would have
crushed it.
All candid Protestants will allow that Luther was a man of strong passions,
and without him the mild and virtuous Melancthon would never have been
able to procure religious liberty for Europe ; bnt while the intelligent Pro-
testant is thankful for the victory achieved by Luther over the intolerance
of Rome, he has too just a sense of the respect which he owes to his own
character, to enter into a vindication of all the words and actions by which
Luther achieved that glorious victory over bigotry and blood.
Without a Howard, the prisons would not have been reformed. Without
a Washington, a Franklin, and a Bolivar, America would still retain the
blessing of taxation without representation. Without a Luther, there would
have been no reformation. Without a Knox, Episcopacy would have still
blessed Scotland. Without a Wesley and a Whitfield, there would have been
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. 97
from either of the great leading parties in Ireland ; because
these parties are actuated by other motives than those of the
public good. From the people of Ireland, if permitted to
obey the generous impulses of their generous nature, we
would receive justice ; and we have received it in divers pub-
lic assemblies, as well as in private Catholic society, when
no influence was exerted to withhold the boon ; but those
generous people, both Protestant and Catholic, together with
the whole press of the capital of Ireland, are under the
direction and influence of powers, with which TRUTH, pre-
suming to bear testimony against any portion of their cor-
ruption, would vainly labour to contend ; and if this applies
to O'Connell, his party, and his press, it attaches with equal
force to every high church portion of the Protestant press of
Ireland, and to every meeting, religious and political, where
the advocate of any truth that does not tally with the object
of the meeting and its leaders, would receive the same treat-
ment that poor Clayton received from O'Connell, in a
meeting of the Catholic Association; that Mr. O'Hagan
received at a meeting of the New Reformation Society, in
the Rotunda of Dublin ; and with which the author of this
work had also been honoured, in a Catholic meeting at the
Corn Exchange in the same city ; at the first Brunswick
meeting convened in Dublin (where personal violence was
their last argument) ; and lastly, at a biblical meeting in
Sligo, where, after discussion was publicly invited and
accepted, and a fair hearing (after routine business) promised
to the acceptor from the chair, the clerical underlings of the
no Methodism; and without a Harry VIII., England might have been still sub-
ject to the Pope. We Protestants regard all these men as the benefactors of their
country ; and yet they all had their crimes, errors, and infirmities, as well as
Dan, as we ourselves, and all other men, since nature has been corrupted by
the fall. Let us therefore forgive his faults for the sake of his virtues ; and
as by his supereminent talents he has procured liberty for himself and his
Catholic brethren, let us hope that his name will descend to posterity as the
restorer of Ireland (in a happy moral union with the British Empire) to
that prosperity into which she was so rapidly ascending before England
took her into her cold embrace.
H
98 IRELAND,
plot, in order to find an apology for breaking the Chairman's
pledge, and the invitation of the Rev. Mr. Me Neale (son-
in-law of Dr. Magee, the then Archbishop of Dublin) to
enter upon free discussion, kept preaching long winded ser-
mons to the people until a late hour in the evening, when
no one could listen to a reply ! This is the kind of justice
that men find in Ireland who are of no faction, and exactly
the same sort of justice they receive from that slave of
faction,
THE DUBLIN PRESS.
The press has now become an engine of such enormous
power, and exercises such an influence over the public mind
in Ireland, that no outline of this country will be deemed
satisfactory to the public, without some observations on the
existing state of that immense machine, which, by a secret
influence, forces the whole tide of society before it ; notwith-
standing that it is as crazy and corrupt as it is huge and
unwieldy, and is continually vomiting forth a promiscuous
mass of good and evil upon the country.
That much important truth oozes through the crevices of
this crazy and corrupt machine, propelled in most cases by
interested managers, for purposes very foreign to those of
truth and the public welfare, (but here the out and out
friends of the press will interrupt us and say, that its managers
could not possibly live by fair dealing; and that, like attor-
nies, priests, and doctors, they are really as honest as they
can afford to be.) That much valuable truth, we say, oozes
through the crevices of this crazy and corrupt machine,
must be admitted ; for if some proportion of truth were not
blended with the lying impositions that are every day prac-
tised upon the prejudices and passions of the people for
selfish ends, even the factions for whom they write would
blush and be disgusted ; but that the press of Dublin is the
tool of privilege and plunder, upon one side ; and of ambi-
tion, private interest, and factious purposes, (mixed up with
the Nation's just claims) upon the other ; a cool and sensible
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. 99
observer, raised by the force of his own virtue and genius
above the plots and prejudices of his country, has only to
see and be convinced of.
It has already been hinted at, in mitigation of the censure
due to such a corrupt course, that men who have embarked
their all in a printing and publishing establishment, are
forced, by irresistible necessity, in such a country as Ireland,
to enlist their capital and talents under the banners of a
faction, and to follow the leaders of that faction through
thick and thin, (a principle of policy, however, though equally
with them dependent upon public patronage for support,
that the author of this work has always trampled under foot,
in the management of his various literary concerns ;) and
farther, that a corrupt people must always have a corrupt
press, inasmuch as they would neither read nor support a
publication that was not embarked in the service of their
prejudices ! and still less, one that was expressly originated
to reform their vices, correct their prejudices, and teach them
to snap asunder the silken chains of monopoly, upon the one
hand, and those iron chains of Priestcraft, upon the other ;
by which their souls have been made the instruments of their
own slavery, and of the poverty and degradation of the
country which gave them birth.
That arguments deducible from these selfish considerations
will always have much force in the way of trade, we well
know ; and that they will always be regarded as paramount
by the man, whose chief object is his own private interest,
requires no force of logic to convince the candid mind.
On this principle the slave dealer (and we would fain
know whether the poor brawny blacksmith, who forges
chains for the body, or the thinking literary impostor who
forges fetters for the mind, is the greater criminal of the
two?) On this principle, we say, the slave dealer is a
righteous man and a good citizen in his own vocation, and
should not be censured with severity by the moralist, since
he only forges chains for the body ; while the literary cri-
minal, whose turpitude he overlooks, makes fast those fetters
100 IRELAND,
of slavery and superstition, from which the General who has
conquered in the field, and the Orator who has triumphed
in the senate, have not been able to escape.
If this apology for the corrupt press of Dublin stand good,
then the Evening Mail, the Warder, and other papers of
that stamp, cannot be justly censured by their opposers, for
having travelled the whole way with the tithes and the
Parsons ; for preaching up the purity and impeccability
of their friends the Bishops ; for vainly pretending (at the
very moment when they give the lie to the gospel, by calling
on Protestants to arm in the support of & forced maintenance
for the ministry !) that they believe the New Testament to
be the standard of a Christian's faith and practice, and the
only sure instrument of a Christian education in their native
land ! seeing that it is their obvious interest to preach up
these doctrines; and all others, however gross and con-
tradictory, that minister to the errors and corrupt interests
of the party who support them, and from whose favour alone
they can hope to reap a rich harvest of reward.
Neither are they to be censured for stooping to persuade
such poor Protestants as cannot reason well upon these sub-
jects, that the tithes and the church are one and indivisible ;
and that if the former should fall, the latter will sink into
extinction ! and in like manner, ceteris paribus, that if Par-
liament should be reformed, and the laws purified, the British
constitution (by which they always mean Protestant privi-
lege, Protestant ascendancy, and Protestant plunder) will
be tainted in its purity ; and, as a final result of this disaster,
that the state will perish } These worthy journalists do not
feel it necessary to place American Protestantism in the
fore-ground of the systems which they thus rear upon narrow
and untenable foundations; nor Protestantism, even as it
stands in France, where the ministers of this religion are
well and sufficiently supported by the state, without any aid
from the Levitical establishment. In the former of these
countries (we mean the United States), Protestantism stands
upon the foundation of its own evidence, and in the full
THE PRESS AND THE PARTIES. 101
enjoyment of its own manly freedom, without any aid from
the laws or constitution of that country, which, like our own
humble but independent labours, disclaim all connection