LETTER XXXIII. Historical ramble continued First INTRODUCTION. "Exile and death are not the instruments of government, but the miserable expedients which show the absence of all government." Right Hon. W. C. (now Lord) Plunket's Speech in the House of THE memoirs now submitted to the English public are the production of an Irish exile, and were written to vindicate his own character, and the cause in which he had suffered. In the preface to the first American edition, he says, that he has found great ignorance prevailing respecting the situation of Ireland, and thinking people complaining that they could not reconcile to their minds the idea of a nation of rebels, or a kingdom out of the king's peace. He asks, significantly, "If a government be so manifestly against a people, and a people so manifestly against a government; if a kingdom must be put out of the king's peace, that a faction may monopolize royal power, on which side is the rebellion ?" He says, "the answer arises spontaneously in the breast of every free American," he might now add," and of every free Briton." The time is not long gone by when any apology for the motives that influenced the United Irishmen, any complacent advertence to their grounds of action, would have been received with a storm of affected horror and all the virtuous indignation of outraged loyalty; happily, the world has now learned that governments have duties as well as subjects, that the treason of a minister against a people is as possible and as culpable as the treason of the people against the minister, and that passive obedience, so far from being always a merit, may be sometimes a crime. Had Mr. Sampson submitted his case of unmerited and bitter persecution to the people of England some years ago, the advocates of oppression would have simply answered that he was a rebel and a traitor, and there would have been an end of the matter. Few, if any, would have taken the trouble to inquire the justice or the meaning of such dishonourable epithets; it would have been taken for granted that rebellion included in it every species of moral and political guilt, and that instead of complaining against the mean and paltry hostility that followed its victim through all Europe, the author should have recorded his gratitude for the mercy shown in sparing his life. Such compendious but not very rational canons of judgment have, however, ceased to be popular, and now preserve their sway only in the minds of those for whom the stream of time flows in vain, who, either through deficiency of intellect or obstinacy of character, are unaltered, when all around them is changed, and are wilfully ignorant in spite of experience. The fair hearing which Mr. Sampson justly expects will now probably be conceded, his tale of wrongs attentively heard and impartially considered. These memoirs were originally written in a series of letters to a friend, and retain some of the defects incident to correspondence, but especially the assumption that the general reader is as well acquainted with certain characters and circumstances as the person for whose perusal the letters were originally intended; but, unfortunately, there is scarcely any point of history more misrepresented and more misunderstood than the proceedings of the United Irishmen, and the different transactions, some wholly disunited, and others but partially connected, which are usually blended into an anomalous whole, and called the Irish Rebellion of 1798. It is therefore necessary, in addition to the usual account of the author, to prefix some account of the times and events to which his narrative refers. This is a task of great pain and of some danger; it is ever painful to trace a history whose characters are written in blood and flame, it is doubly so when some of the actors still remain on the stage, and still retain too lively a recollection of the exasperating feelings engendered by civil feuds; it is dangerous, because the fires still glow beneath the treacherous ashes, and ill bear to be disturbed by a rash hand. To an Irishman the task of writing even a brief sketch of that calamitous period is peculiarly distressing; he has to record the crimes and follies of his countrymen, with the torturing feeling that he is sure to offend some valued friend of one party or the other; because neither will tolerate any approach to the opinions of the opposite. There are two established modes of relating this history in Ireland, they are sufficiently brief and characteristic; one party says, "A junto of tyrants, whose cruelties exceeded the worst actions of Nero and Domitian, drove an outraged people to take up arms, and punished with remorseless barbarity the excesses provoked by their own crimes." The other says, "A union of infidels and papists made an unprovoked attack on a mild and merciful government, which afterwards, with foolish clemency, allowed too many of the traitors to escape with impunity;" from such pregnant texts are easily derived volumes of vituperative declamation, with laudable modesty, denominated history. The editor cannot adopt either version of the circumstances, for the simple reason that both are untrue, and both the most mischievous falsehoods that have ever been propagated. There has never yet been a civil war with a clear case of right on one side and of wrong on the other; to assert such a thing would be to declare that nature produces iniquity and perfection in such large masses as to allow of our characterizing classes of men as fiends or angels. In all discords much evil must of necessity be found on both sides, and much must be attributed to circumstances, not subject to the control of either. The establishment of the legislative independence of the Irish parliament in 1782, is the period in the history of his country to which an Irishman refers with most pride and pleasure; but it may be very fairly questioned whether that event produced all the advantages for which it has gained credit. The change from the supremacy of the English parliament to the domination of a few borough proprietors, and virtually the alteration amounted to nothing more, added, and could add, little to the internal happiness and prosperity of the country, though it increased its external respectability by giving Ireland a place in the list of nations. The greatest and most practical evils it left unredressed, and in some degree aggravated; it removed not unequal laws, it secured not impartial justice, it left the tenantry still groaning under the worse than Egyptian bondage of rapacious landlords, and removed from the wretched serfs all hopes of amendment, since the authors of their wrongs were also the persons from .whom alone they could seek redress. Even so late as the year 1822, lord Redesdale, a nobleman by no means remarkable for his popular sympathies, described the magisterial abuses that prevailed in Ireland in the following memorable words. "I have been intimately connected with that illfated country for twenty years, and I am sorry to say that there exists in it two sorts of justice, the one for the rich, the |