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fortunes have invoked my sympathies, whose factions I have sought to still; whose intellect I have prompted to a lofty aim; whose freedom has been my fatal dream. I offer to that country, as a proof of the love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke and struggled for her freedom, the life of a young heart; and with that life all the hopes, the honors, the endearments of an honorable home. Pronounce then, my lords, the sentence which the law directs, and I will be prepared to hear it. I trust I shall be prepared to meet its execution. I hope to be able, with a pure heart and a perfect composure, to appear before a higher tribunal— a tribunal where a judge of infinite goodness, as well as of justice, will preside, and where, my lords, many, many of the judgments of this world will be reversed.-T. F. Meagher.

THE MISERIES OF WAR.

THE stoutest heart in this assembly would recoil were he, who owns it, to behold the destruction of a single individual by some deed of violence. Were the man who, at this moment, stands before you, in the full play and energy of health, to be, in another moment, laid, by some deadly aim, a lifeless corpse at your feet, there is not one of you who would not prove how strong are the relentings of nature at a spectacle so hideous as death. There are some of you who would be haunted for whole days by the image of horror you had witnessed; who would feel the weight of a most oppressive sensation upon your heart, which nothing but time could wear away; who would be so pursued by it as to be unfit for business or for enjoyment; who would think of it through the day, and it would spread a gloomy disquietude over your waking moments; who would dream of it at night, and it would turn that bed, which you courted as a retreat from the torments of an ever-meddling memory, into a scene of restlessness. Oh, tell me, if there be any relentings of pity in your bosom, how could you endure it, to behold the agonies of the dying man, as, goaded by pain, he grasps the cold ground in convulsive energy; or, faint with the loss of blood, his pulse ebbs low, and the gathering paleness spreads itself over his countenance; or, wrapping himself round in despair, he can only mark, by a few feeble quiverings, that life still lurks and lingers in his lacerated body; or, lifting up a faded eye he casts on you a look of imploring helplessness for that succor which no sympathy can yield him? It

may be painful to dwell thus, in imagination, on the distressing picture of one individual, but multiply it ten thousand times; say how much of all this distress has been heaped together on a single field; give us the arithmetic of this accumulated wretchedness, and lay it before us, with all the accuracy of an official computation, and, strange to tell, not one sigh is lifted up among the crowd of eager listeners, as they stand on tiptoe, and catch every syllable of utterance which is read to them out of the registers of death. Oh! say, what mystic spell is that which so blinds us to the suffering of our brethren; which deafens to our ear the voice of bleeding humanity when it is aggravated by the shriek of dying thousands; which makes the very magnitude of the slaughter throw a softening disguise over its cruelties and its horrors; which causes us to eye, with indifference, the field that is crowded with the most revolting abominations, and arrests that sigh which each individual would, singly, have drawn from us by the report of the many who have fallen and breathed their last in agony along with him. Chalmers.

FALSE COLORING LENT TO WAR.

ON every side of me I see causes at work which go to spread a most delusive coloring over war, and to remove its shocking barbarities to the background of our contemplations altogether. I see it in the history which tells me of the superb appearance of the troops, and the brilliancy of their successive charges. I see it in the poetry which lends the magic of its numbers to the narrative of blood, and transports its many admirers, as by its images, and its figures, and its nodding plumes of chivalry, it throws its treacherous embellishments over a scene of legalized slaughter. I see it in the music which represents the progress of the battle; and when, after being inspired by the trumpet-notes of preparation, the whole beauty and tenderness of a drawing-room are seen to bend over the sentimental entertainment; nor do I hear the utterance of a single sigh to interrupt the deathtones of the thickening contest, and the moans of the wounded men, as they fade away upon the ear, and sink into lifeless silence.

All, all goes to prove what strange and half-sighted crea tures we are. Were it not so, war could never have been seen in any other aspect than that of unmingled hatefulness;

and I can look to nothing but to the progress of Christian sentiment upon earth to arrest the strong current of the popular and prevailing partiality for war. Then only will an imperious sense of duty lay the check of severe principle on all the subordinate tastes and faculties of our nature. Then will glory be reduced to its right estimate, and the wakeful benevolence of the Gospel, chasing away every spell, will be turned by the treachery of no delusion whatever from its simple but sublime enterprises for the good of the species. Then the reign of truth and quietness will be ushered into the world, and war-cruel, atrocious, unrelenting war-will be stripped of its many and its bewildering fascinations. Chalmers.

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SECTARIAN LEGISLATION.

I FEEL far less anger than I feel sorrow at the coarse invectives directed against the Catholic religion, and entertain emotions not unallied to pity towards those who are sufficiently fanatical to indulge in them; let me be permitted to add that the man who denounces the Catholic religion as an idolatry, incurs the frightful hazard of teaching other men to inquire whether the Christian religion itself is not a fable. But, even supposing the Catholic religion to be a tissue of errors, it is clear that you cannot convert us by abusing us. The Catholic church in Ireland is "an accomplished fact;" you cannot get rid of it. You cannot uproot it; but you may give a useful direction to its branches; and, if I may so say, by training them along the legalized institutions of the country, make it productive of what you yourselves would be disposed to acknowledge to be useful fruit. You must take Ireland as it is, and you must adapt your policy to the condition of the people, and not to your own peculiar religious feelings. A statesman has no right to found his legislation upon his theology; and the policy by which Ireland should be governed is entirely different from that which the antagonists of Maynooth* recommend to the adoption of the first minister of the crown. What is the policy worthy of the man by whom the great office of prime minister is held, in this the greatest country in the world? In the very position which he occupies an answer to that question is to be found. How great is the height to which the chief minister

* The Catholic college of Maynooth.

of England is exalted! From that height nothing little should be discernible. Everything diminutive should vanish. Nothing but the large, the lofty, and the noble should be seen. When from that surpassing elevation, whence the British empire is disclosed to him, he turns his eyes to the island which is immediately contiguous to your own, what should he behold? Not, most assuredly, the church or the chapel, or the conventicle—not a miserable arena for scholastic controversy-not an appropriate field in which the Protestant and the Catholic, and the Calvinist should engage in a theological conflict, and trample upon every precept of the Gospel, in their fierce and anti-Christian encounter. Shall I venture to tell you what he should behold—what Bacon,— what Spenser and Bacon beheld more than two centuries before him-what Pitt, and Burke, and Fox beheld in later times-one of the finest islands in the ocean, peopled by millions of men, bold and brave and chivalrous-whose very imperfections are akin to virtue, and who are capable of the noblest amelioration—an island blessed with a fortunate climate, a soil inexhaustibly fertile, a point of contact between the Old World and the New-an island to which Providence has been lavish in its bounty, and from the development of whose incalculable resources an incalculable benefit might be conferred upon the empire; and by the statesmen by whom that great work shall be accomplished an imperishable fame shall be obtained. And if such be the spectacle which Ireland presents to his contemplation-in the contemplation of such a spectacle, what emotions should he experience, what desires should he derive from it, and with what aspirations should his heart be lifted up? Should he think-should he for one moment give himself leave to think—of making such a country subservient to the indulgence of any sectarian prejudice, or of any religious predilection? To assert the purposes of Providence,-to carry out the designs of which, wherever we turn our eyes, we behold the magnificent manifestations to repair the mistake of centuries-to pour balm into a nation's heart-to efface pernicious recollections-to awaken salubrious hopes-to banish a splendid phantom-to substitute a glorious and attainable reality-to induce England to do justice to Ireland, and to make Ireland appreciate the justice of England, and thus to give an everlasting stability to this great and majestic empire-these are the objects to which a man should direct his whole heart and his entire soul, who feels conscious of the sacred trust reposed in him by his sovereign, and that God has given him the high capacity to fulfil it.-Richard L. Sheil, 1845.

POST-OFFICE ESPIONAGE.*

I HAVE risen in order to move the resolution of which I gave notice before the Easter recess. I submit it in the fol

lowing terms:

"Resolved, That this house has learned with regret, that with a view to the prevention of a political movement in Italy, and more especially in the Papal States, the letters of a foreigner, which had no relation to the maintenance of the internal tranquillity of the United Kingdom, should have been opened under a warrant, bearing date the 1st of March, and cancelled on the 3d of June, 1844, and that the information obtained by such means should have been communicated to a foreign power."

The Secretary for the Home Department signed a warrant on the 1st of March for the opening of Mazzini's letters. We are told that the information deduced from the letters was communicated to a foreign power, but did not implicate any person within the reach of that foreign power. But be this as it may, there are two facts beyond doubt; first, that the Italian newspapers boasted that Mazzini was under the peculiar surveillance of the English police; and, secondly, that six weeks after the letters were opened six men were put to death for political offences at Bologna. At any rate, it is certain, that for three months Mazzini's letters were opened, and folded again, and re-sealed, and delivered to him just as if nothing at all had happened.

I ask, what is the palliation for this proceeding? I will give it from the answer given by the prime minister to a question put by the member for Pontefract. Your extenuation is this: not that the inhabitants of Romagna have not monstrous grievances to complain of-no such thing; but this-if there be an outbreak in Romagna, the Austrian army will march into the Papal States; if the Austrian army march into the Papal States the French will send troops to Ancona; if the French send troops to Ancona there may be a collision; if there be a collision there may be a war between Austria and France; if there be a war between Austria and France there may be a general continental war; if there be a continental war England may be involved in it; and, therefore, but not at the desire of Lord Aberdeen, you opened

*Speech in the House of Commons, April 1, 1845, on moving a resolution regarding the letters of Joseph Mazzini, which had been opened by the warrant of Sir James Graham, one of her Majesty's Secretaries of State.

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