of the people, and as a triumph to that mass of lawless turbulence and crime which inhabits this island; and therefore while it elates beyond measure the fierce and ferocious populace, it at the same time discourages and disheartens the Protestants of the lower orders. Of late years the tendency of all the measures of government has been the elating the minds of the factious Papists, and disheartening the spirit of the steady and loyal Protestants. The Emancipation Bill has been viewed by the Protestants of the lower orders as opening the door to all aggression; then the Reform Bill, by which the Protestant boroughs were opened to a Catholic constituency ; the Church Bill, by which the right of Catholics to legislate for the Protestant church is admitted; then the novel Education scheme, by which scripture education is nationally excluded from the people; then the prosecutions and insults with which the government has visited the Protestant gentry and people; and again, the statute which suppresses those harmless processions and anniversary meetings which were regarded as the holy-day amusements and religious triumphs of the Protestants of the lower orders. All these have alienated their minds; and though, perhaps, they have been mistaken as to the intention and the tendency of these several measures; and though they may be taking a gloomy and unwarrantable view of them and their probable results, yet as they must be influenced by their own views, they have begun to feel distrust towards the government, and too careless as to British connexion. The result, the sad result of all which, is, that feeling themselves exposed, like devoted victims, to all the hostility of the native populace, and thinking themselves slighted, neglected, unprotected, injured by the government, they resolve to leave these wretched shores, and to seek elsewhere the peace and protection which is denied them in this unhappy island. the classes upon which such pressure was least required, and they totally passed by the wild and unshapen mass of the population who were permitted to remain undisturbed in their Popery; and it should ever be kept in mind, that although those statutes secured every place of emolument or of trust to the Protestants, yet they were the Protestants of the higher classes. The Protestants of the lower orders derived no advantage or privilege whatever; but, on the other hand, were exposed to all the jealousy and hatred of the Roman Catholics, arising out of these measures of religious exclusion, which, after all, brought to them no one advantage of any kind. Another evil, and it was one of immense importance, arising out of these statutes, was the encouragement they seemed to give to those who thought they had no other duty to perform in promoting the loveliness of Protestantism than enacting penalties against Romanism. The government and the landlords seemed to think that they could suppress superstition by pains, and stifle Popery by penalties, and that they had done all that either God or man need require, when they had enacted a statute! Such notions led them to neglect the true means of educating, enlightening, and evangelizing the people, and still farther conduced to the neglect of the Protestants of the lower orders, while they seemed to think, that the enactment of some fearful statute would remedy every evil that might arise from the paucity of the Protestant population: thus it happened that, notwithstanding all the zeal for penal statutes for which our former governments were remarkable, the mass of Popery and ignorance continued to this day, in which a system of diametrically opposite character has been adopted. We allude to the system of concession-concession to clamour, turbulence, and threats. If it were a spontaneous concession of an admitted right, we might then both pardon and approve it; but when we have seen Emancipation conceded to Irish turbulence, and Reform conceded to English threats, and the Church conceded to senseless clamour, we can neither pardon nor approve it. In this distracted country every concession is looked upon as a yielding to the power These tendencies to concession on the part of the government, and all that troubled disorganized state of society that prevails among the lower orders in Ireland, work together to the disquiet and the discouragement of the Protestants, and have impressed their minds with the feeling that they have been betrayed and sacrificed to their antagonists. There is among them a sense of weakness-a consciousness of being exposed to the bursting of all the wild and unbridled passions of the populace a continually recurring sense of injury to life, or limb, or pro perty. It is very possible that this feeling may be, to a certain extent, groundless, and that it may not be altogether warranted by the circumstances which engender it; but certain it is, that this feeling of alarm is prevalent among them to a most distressing extent. Those who reside in the calm and thinking fields of England, or in the circles of metropolitan society, and those every where who roam through higher spheres and in more exalted orbits, breathe, as it were, a social atmosphere of a totally different character; so different, that they can form no adequate conception of the state of existence in which the Protestants of the lower orders "live, and move, and have their being;" and, unhappily for this distracted people, the few gentlemen of property, whose mansions, like angelic visits, are "few and far between," either from distaste, or indifference, or some other feeling, more look into the state of the lower classes of any persuasion, and are, as a body, to which there are of course some noble and shining exceptions, wholly unacquainted with the feelings of the people, unless when they display themselves in the periodical excitements of an election. The feelings of the lower order of Protestants are only known by a close and kind intimacy with them in the bosom of their families: it is before their altars and their hearths that, when they find the ear of sympathy, they speak out their bursting feelings, and betray all that consciousness of weakness and sense of insecurity of which we write. Truly there are sights and sounds familiar to them that are unknown among other men. Every savage murder-every place where blood and brains have stained the ground-the echoing tread of the midnight legislators, as they pass the lowly and lonely cottage on their mission of crime-the mysterious whisper that even in noontide passes like a watchword among the people-the cold reserve, or the sullen scowl that falls upon all that are true to religion and loyal to the laws-the unconcealed hatred of all that is connected with England, with government, with the landlords, with religion-all fall upon their ears, and rush into their eyes as so many omens portending misfortunes, and seeming to mutter destruction to them and theirs, as devoting all they prize and love to irretrievable ruin. It is thus that a sense of insecurity becomes the prevailing impression on their minds, and it is only natural when we remember that all the horrors of former rebellions, and the blood and shrieks of various periodical disturbances, are still echoing in their ears; for there is scarcely one Protestant family of the lower orders that has not been more or less, at one time or another during the last fifty years, the victim of rebellion or disturbance, of religious or political hate; so that some of its members have been injured in life, or limb, or property. This is so universal among them, that no two or three families of this class can meet together without some one of their number being an evidence of that state of insecurity in which they live. It ceases, therefore, to be a matter of surprise that they should emigrate in such vast numbers, for the experience of both sire and son seems to point out this island to their eyes as a devoted land, doomed to be blighted, and withering under the primeval curse, and they long therefore "to flee away, and be at rest"-to wander far from those shores where every wave seems to waft some new trouble, and where there is no peace, no home, no happiness for them. Thus has it been, that owing to this and to other causes, to which we have not at present space to advert, the Protestants of Ireland are leaving the home of their fathers for the land of strangers-abandoning a land that seems to weep tears of blood, and to echo, with the shriek of some dismal and ill-omened spirit, for a land where they may sow in peace and reap in joy, and where the want and misery, and tears, and crimes, and treasons of the land they leave, will come upon their memory only like a vanished dream, and breathe upon their hearts the sweet and soothing spirit of thank fulness and joy. For ourselves, who remain in this ill-starred land, the prospect is dark indeed; for we can see no light even in the distance, no starry ray amidst the "blackness of darkness" that enshrouds our political horizon; for we feel we are losing those noble spirits whose feelings and whose wishes were identified with all the real interests of property, and with the connexion of these sister islands, and on whose fearless hearts and strong right arms we once relied for the assertion of our cause and the maintenance of true liberty and true religion; but all that has now passed away like the day dreams of our youth, and we are constrained to behold them an unhappy and devoted : It race, neglected and unprotected by those to whom they were once a shield, and hated and trampled on by those to whom they were innocent as unweaned children they now no more see a home in this island of tears and blood, and they sigh day and night for the winds and waves that shall bear them to other and happier lands. falls like sickness on the heart to witness the saddening sight of the aged and the young-the sire and the sonthe relics of the past and the hopes of the future, all mingling together in this long and daring pilgrimage. Our hearts are melancholy while we breathe a prayer and bespeak a blessing on our departed and departing brothers! THE CARILLONS. [As I stood in the window of an hotel on the Continent, a distant chime of bells, or Carillons, struck me as bearing some resemblance in their note to sounds I remembered in my boyhood.] The sports that braced my boyhood there, The boyish friend those sports to share, The heavenly brow unswept by care- Such burthen on your bells you bear, Ring on! ring on!-a hallowed train, They quit the dust where they have lain, I smile, although I know 'tis vain, 'Tis thus we trifle with our pain, Late messengers from life-time's springs, Sad tidings bear ye on your wings, Ye tell of old, forgotten things, Their funeral knell your music rings, We part-ye silently repose, I go to commune with my woes, The mists that round the memory close, The peal has ceased-the spell is o'er, Again the whelming billows roar, Embarked new regions to explore, -Adieu, faint voices from the shore, ADVENA. |