Italy, Poland, Ireland too-Ireland, part and parcel of the British empire-they have all, ALL, within the same short period of half a century, passed through the fire to Moloch, the revolutionary deity, whom, as oracular and infallible, on questions of civil government, all consult to discover its true principle! As to Italy, she, indeed, only followed the fortunes of France, and was dragged at the chariot wheels of her tyrant, and needs no observation. POLAND, the land of the bravest and most romantic lovers of ill-understood LIBERTY whom Europe ever saw-Poland has vanished from among the nations; she has been extinguished while trying the last of a numerous series of revolutionary experiments on popular liberty, combined with popular license. She has ceased to be a country: she has perished in making her last struggle; and there is no promise of a resurrection for her as a people! Her time for experiment to find the precise point beyond which liberty cannot exist for a populace not amenable to a power governing by law, is passed away, probably for ever; while Russia, despotic and remorseless in the exercise of her tremendous and ever-spreading power, tried, and still is trying, on her part, the experimentum crucis on the miserable remains of the Polish population; an experiment to ascertain whether the best mode of governing refractory patriots be, or be not, the unqualified forfeiture of the property, and the

universal banishment, to the wildest region of her own wide empire, of all whom she shall not have decided to slaughter in cold blood!

Then IRELAND-unhappy Ireland! she not only for the last half century, but for successive centuries, has been the morbid subject of experiments in government. Let us not look back at the crimes and the errors of her early history. View her in her most palmy state;-the day of her glory-the revolution of 1782, when she was taught to think, and was credulous enough to believe, that she became an INDEPENDENT NATION! When England reluctantly gave up the claim to bind Ireland by British law, the Irish patriot, more suo, shouted in wild triumph, "Independence and self-government !" He was thoroughly ignorant of the principle, that men may be governed by indirect and corrupting influence as efficiently as by direct legislation. He seems, indeed, not even to have conceived the possibility of it. Accordingly the Irish independent parliament ruled for England from 1782 to 1798; but in that year Ireland avowed, by an organized rebellion, that she was dissatisfied with this principle, on which she at last felt that England ruled her. Her patriots resolved to try principles of another kind: most of them, those by which the French people were misgoverning themselves. But, in addition, the Irish patriot sagely asserted the truth and practicability of the principle of

maintaining the port and bearing of an independent hostile nation, in a state of total separation from England; her little island, with a population then of about three millions, against the British empire, then the most powerful empire in the world! This was, however, soon found to be a false principle on which to govern Ireland. Her experimental rebellion was quashed. English power, though France lent its aid to the rebels, achieved an easy and bloodless victory. The phantom of Irish legislative independence continued its ghostly appearance only for the short period of two years: for, within that time, England, who had taught Ireland the fallacy of her principle of rebellion, adopted one which events have demonstrated to be equally false, and, it may be, eventually more fatal to the general interests of the empire. England, obliged to give up the principle of governing Ireland by a corrupt influence over her independent (independent!) parliament, and to try a new, and, as her statesmen, no doubt, believed it to be, the only sound principle on which Ireland could be governed-she resolved on trying the principle of corrupting this independent Irish legislature to vote away its own political existence, and the independence of Ireland, such as it was, with it! The purchase was made, and the price paid in monies numbered; and after this bargain, sale, and delivery, Ireland became part and parcel of the British empire! Thirty-six years have passed

since this new order of things has arisen for so many years this last great experiment of imperial British government has been on its trial, what has been its success? Let the present state of unexampled distraction in British councils and the obviously impending dangers that threaten the British people, answer!

It will be useful, however, in our present enquiry, to take a rapid glance at the experiments on government which have been made within that time in Ireland, thus become a part of the British empire.

A short mention of facts and events, which unfortunately we all too well remember, will suffice.

The first was an experiment at revolution, made by the boy Emmet; young indeed, but possessing great talents, highly cultivated, and fresh from the hotbed of experimental politics in which the former rebellion had been hatched deeply imbued too with the principles of that school in which civil insubordination had been successfully taught as civic virtue! His, however, was but the rebellion of a day-it ended and was signalized but by two events; one, the murder of a Chief Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland, Lord Kilwarden, one of the most truly humane, just, and benevolent magistrates who ever graced the Irish bench,-the other, the execution of Emmet himself, for his

treason, who, though his unhappy fate, combined with his unusual eloquence and talents, excited for him very general commiseration-did not appear to die a repentant rebel.

The next experiment at improved government which followed that of the union of the two legislatures, was in the very highest degree, in every view of it, important to the whole empire-and whether it shall end in disappointment or success, has manifestly been pregnant with great results. This was the total abolition of the disqualifying laws against Roman Catholics—a measure by which Irish Catholics became vested with that highest species of political power known in a free statethat of sitting in the legislative assembly of the nation, and in the existing instance, the power of sitting and voting in the legislature of a state exclusively Protestant by its constitution, and that a constitution connecting by an express and fundamental law, the Protestant church with the Protestant state, on a principle, till then unquestioned, that such a connexion was essential to the safety of both! Thus the Irish Catholics became in posse what they eventually became in fact, a third party in the British senate, and in the habitual divisions of British party, enabled to become the arbiters between both, and to give a decisive preponderance to whichsoever of the factions or parties into which the legislature might split, which might