common, Leitrim, Longford, Meath, and Kildare, despoiling in the night the peaceable inhabitants of their arms, and latterly also of their money and valuable effects. By this act the lord lieutenant in council was authorized to proclaim, on the requisition of seven of its magistrates, assembled at a sessions of the peace, any county or district thereof, as in a state of disturbance, and thereby to invest the magistrates with an extraordinary power of seizing, imprisoning, and sending aboard his majesty's fleet, such persons as should be found at unlawful assemblies, or otherwise acting so as to threaten the public tranquillity.

The operation of these temporary laws was forcibly felt in the latter part of this, and in the course of the following year. Considerable numbers of gentlemen, or persons in respectable situations of life, were arrested on private informations of their engagement in the conspiracy, and lodged in prison, many for a great length of time without opportunity of trial. Many districts in the northern counties were proclaimed, and numbers of the lower classes of men sent on board of the king's navy.

:. These acts of severity, apparently inconsistent with the spirit of the constitution, were not without cause. A contest, or trial of strength, seems to have arisen between the existing government and the association, which of the

two should overpower the other. Each vigorous measure, adopted on one side, excited another to counteract it on the opposite. To furnish themselves with arms, the lower classes, like the defenders, assembled in parties in the night, and disarmed those whom they regarded as the adherents of government. To save the produce of the soil to their friends in prison, and to testify their attachment to the gentlemen of their party, or those whom they imagined not hostile to their cause, they met in large bodies in the day to dig out the potatoes and reap the corn of several individuals. The greatness of the numbers assembled on these occasions, much exceeding what the specified purposes required; (for in some instances four or five thousand were said to be collected in one body)—their marching with music in a sort of military order, and their assembling on such other pretences as funerals and matches of football, gave cause to suspect that the real object of these meetings was to accustom the men to a readiness in repairing to appointed places of convention, to give confidence to their own party, and to intimidate their opponents. To frustrate the operations of the law, terror and bribery were employed with its agents. Various modes of persecution, and even sometimes assassination, were put in practice against magistrates who exerted themselves to arrest the members of the conspiracy, wit

nesses who appeared against them in courts of justice, and jurors who found them guilty; while the pecuniary subscriptions of the association were partly applied to assist the families of its imprisoned members, to bribe witnesses in trials, and to fee the most eminent pleaders of the law.

Acts of a violent and menacing nature in some of the northern counties, particularly the stealing of ten barrels of gunpowder out of the royal stores in Belfast, are specified in a proclamation of the lord lieutenant and council, bearing date the sixth of November, 1796, in which all magistrates and loyal subjects were strictly commanded to use their best endeavours for the prevention or punishment of such dangerous and treasonable proceedings; orders having been previously issued to the military officers to assist the civil in the execution of this duty. Notwithstanding the enforcement of this proclamation, the United Irish of Ulster would have obtained and employed the means of insurrection, if the French forces, embarked at Brest, for the invasion of Ireland, had effected their landing at Bantry-bay, where they arrived near the end of December in the same year. While the debarkation of the French army, stated at fifteen thousand in number, was prevented by a storm which divided the fleet, the exertions of the society to second the invasion were prevented by

the receipt of two contrary pieces of intelligence from the French government, the one a message in November, promising the arrival of succours immediately; the other a letter in a few days after the messenger's departure, which was considered as authentic, representing the proposed expedition to be deferred until the ensuing spring.*

A continuation of outrages, directed systematically, provoked on the side of government more strenuous exertions to suppress them. Authorized for a discretionary disposition of his troops, to disarm the malecontents and prevent insurrection, (by a letter, dated March the third, 1797, from the right honourable Thomas Pelham, secretary to the lord lieutenant), General Lake, bearing the chief command in the northern district of the kingdom, issued on the thirteenth of that month a proclamation, enjoining all persons not empowered to keep arms by government, to surrender their arms and ammunition to the commanding officers in their several neighbourhoods, and promising to informers inviolable secrecy, together with rewards to the full value of the stores of war discoveredin consequence of their information.†

The troops were so disposed as to search all suspected places for military stores, and to pre

* Appendix to the report, &c. No. 31. Ibid. Nos. 8 and 9.

vent unlawful assemblies, especially in the night, after a certain hour, in which all persons found abroad without authority were liable to arrest and punishment: but the quantity of arms thus collected proving comparatively small, and the plans of the society still remaining in force,` whose exertions at the assizes, during the circuit in the succeeding month of April, so far frustrated the prosecutions of the crown as to render the result rather an encouragement than the contrary to the conspirators-measures of a still more forcible nature were demanded.

Another proclamation from the lord lieutenant was issued on the seventeenth of the following month, declaring the efforts of the civil power to have been found inadequate for the preservation of the public peace; the most effectual orders to have been sent to the officers of his majesty's troops to employ their utmost power for the suppression of treasonable attempts; and the king's most gracious pardon to be tendered to all such (excepting persons guilty of certain specified crimes), as on or before the twentyfourth of June should surrender to the magistrates, take the oath of allegiance, and, if bail should be required, enter into recognizance for their future good behaviour. A letter from secretary Pelham to the earl of Carhampton, chief commander of the troops, and orders from the earl to these to act independently of the