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and after a trial, in which all justice is openly mocked, they are lodged in a felon's prison! So things are done in Protestant England: it is emphatically a government for the rich and against the poor; the former are protected, the latter crushed. The chief means of oppressing the poor in England is the imposition of enormous taxes, more enormous than in any other country under heaven, whether Pagan, Mohammedan, or Christian. These taxes are necessary to support the throne, the government, and the aristocracy, as well as to pay the interest on the immense public debt, which is itself entirely and solely of Protestant origin,- aye, a fruit of the reformation in England. It was contracted, as every one knows, by the Protestant house of Brunswick, for the purpose of maintaining the Protestant ascendency in England on the continent.

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Now, only glance at the gigantic iniquity of Anglican Protestantism towards the poor. First, it broke up the monasteries in which they had been sheltered, educated, and fed for centuries: secondly, it covered once merry England" with paupers, and strewed its surface with work-houses supported by taxation; and thirdly, it saddled England with a debt which she can never pay, and the bare interest on which, paid by taxation, grinds down her people to the dust, and reduces her poor to the very verge of starvation! Such have been the political blessings of the English reformation!

For those living in this country it is almost impossible to conceive the extent to which taxation is carried in England, and how grievously it oppresses the poorer classes. As Mr. Lester well says:

"It is a government of privileges and monopolies: the few are born,' as Mr. O'Connell says, 'booted and spurred to ride over the many.' The working classes are degraded and oppressed. All but the privileged orders are taxed from their birth to their death. The mid-wife that assists in bringing the child into the world; the swaddling clothes in which the infant is wrapped; every mouthful of pap or of bread which it eats during its journey through life; every rag of clothes it puts on, and, at last the winding sheet and the coffin in which it is laid in its mother earth all are taxed to pamper a haughty aristocracy, a political church, and the privileged orders."'

This reminds us of the well known passage of Lord Brougham, in which he paints the horrors of English taxation with as much truth as pungency. We will be pardoned for transcribing the passage entire :

"The Englishman is taxed for every thing that enters his mouth, covers his back, or is placed under the feet; taxes are imposed on every thing that is pleasant to see, hear, feel, taste, or smell; taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion; taxes upon every thing on the earth, in the waters, and under the earth; upon every thing that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes upon the raw material, and on every value that is added to it by the ingenuity and industry of man; taxes upon the sauce that pampers man's appetite, and on the drugs that restore him to health; on the ermine that decorates the judge, and on the rope that hangs the criminal; on the brass nails of the coffin, and on the ribbons of the bride:

1 Vol. i. p. 110..

at bed or at board;-couchant ou levant, we must pay. The school-boy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon which has paid thirty per cent., throws himself back on his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent.; and, having made his will, the seals of which are also taxed, expires in the arms of his apothecary, who has paid £100 for the privilege of hastening his death. His whole property is then taxed from two to ten per cent.; and, besides the expenses of probate, he pays large fees for being buried in the chancel, and his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; after all which, he may be gathered to his fathers, to be taxed

no more."

Such, then, is the startling condition to which the Protestant reformation has reduced England; for her present deplorable state is as fairly traceable to that unhappy revolution, as ever was effect to its cause. Such are the political, moral, religious, and social evils which Protestantism has brought upon once happy and merry England. It has banished Christian charity from that once blessed land, and has substituted, in its stead, a certain human, high-sounding philanthropy, as unreal in its benefits, as it is hypocritical in its professions. It has crushed and banished from the house of God the poor, the favorites of Christ, and the favorites of the Catholic Church. It has enthroned avarice,-griping, hard-hearted avarice, in the very temple of God; and has ingrained it in the minds and hearts of the English people. This is the main source of almost all the social anomalies and crying evils of England. England affords a practical commentary on that saying of an inspired apostle: "Covetousness is the root of all evils."

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Are we in this country wholly free from this taint of avarice; from this fever of covetousness, which dries up the very fountains of Christian charity and benevolence? We wish we could say yes; but alas! the contrary precisely is the case. Let us hear what our own countryman, Mr. Lester, says on this subject:

"There is with us, among all classes, a feverish desire to become suddenly rich. There are strong bilious tendencies in our climate; and the whole American people are nervous, excitable, and characterized by great cerebral activity. The American launches on a wild, foaming current, the moment he enters the business world. Money is his object. In the restless pursuit of this he gives himself no leisure for literature, none for society, except at some great, vulgar jam, yclept a party. At forty, he is an old man; and in five years more he is dead. It is nonsense to expect such men can live long, -as soon look for a longlived race horse. We are the least practically philosophical of any people in the world. If a Wall-street banker were to leave his office at two o'clock to spend the rest of the day with his family, he would be hissed on 'Change. Go into any town in the United States, and you will find elderly men in the full zenith of acquisition, and octogenarians who have not yet made enough. It is lamentable.""

The most lamentable circumstance in this picture is its truth. We are imitating England in the very worst feature of her social condition; and

1 Vol. i, p. 235.

let us beware, lest we imitate her in the ulterior development of this fatal principle. We are yet young and vigorous; but we nurture in our social condition the fatal seeds of decay and ruin. Ere the evil become incurable, let us apply the remedy. The only adequate one is a substitution of the spirit of Catholic, social charity for that of Protestant individuality and avarice. Let us look to it in time.

We will close this rapid notice of Mr. Lester's "Glory and Shame of England," by one more extract, in which he does ample justice to the character of the man who was for forty years the unyielding and incorruptible champion of the poor and oppressed in England, Ireland, and Scotland; who was the "best abused man in the world; we mean, of course, the greatest man of his age, Daniel O'Connell. It is some proof of candor and of a wish to be impartial in Mr. Lester, to have done justice to the character of one, whom, he frankly admits, he had but six months before viewed only "as a bold and reckless demagogue."

"But there is one man in Great Britain who has done, and is still doing, more for humanity than Brougham; one who has been long in public life, mingling in every question which has agitated the empire for a quarter of a century or more; who is always found on the side of the people; who has never tripped, halted, varied, nor shifted his course; who has made more public speeches than any other man now living, and always spoken like a republican; who abhors oppression with all his heart; who has been hated, courted, and feared (but never despised) by every party; a man who has been a target for all Britain to shoot at for a whole generation; who has come off victorious from every conflict, even when he has been beaten; who has never betrayed his principles, but is forever betraying his party, or, who, more properly, has no party but his own; who will be bound by no trammels; who is eternally, and with a zeal which never grows cold, demanding justice for all the subjects of the British empire; a man who now stands higher in the hearts of his countrymen, and in the esteem of the world, than ever. You will most likely burst into a loud laugh, when you see his name :-DANIEL O'CONNELL."""

1 Vol. ii, p. 166-7.

XXVIII. CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT COUNTRIES.*

ARTICLE IV.— IRELAND AND THE IRISH.

The great day of reckoning-An historical parallel-Ireland still unconquered-Un-American feeling of hostility to foreigners-Are we really independent of England?-Political nativismWhat have foreigners done for the country?-Why Irishmen are hated -The Irish character-Its lights and shades-English treatment of Ireland-The first period of Ireland's sufferings-Protestant evidence-The second period-The reformation in Ireland-Irish fidelity to the ancient faithPolicy of Elizabeth and the Stuarts-Wholesale confiscation and butchery-The men of 1782-The Union-Protestant ascendency-Emancipation.

ON that great and dreadful Day of the Lord, when nations as well as individuals shall be placed at the bar of God to be judged according to their works, England will have an awful account to render of her stewardship. Her impoverished and down-trodden population within her own borders, the crushed and degraded millions whom she has enslaved in India, and the widows and orphans whom she has made throughout the world, in her reckless career of ambition, will all rise up in judgment against her. The nations of the civilized earth will stand up too, and will bear evidence to her hard-hearted and relentless avarice, to her utter disregard of the most solemn promises and treaties, to her all-grasping spirit of aggrandizement, and to her entire recklessness as to the means by which her ends were to be attained. And on that awful day of final reckoning, the voice of poor crushed and bleeding Ireland shall be heard pleading, with all the earnest eloquence of truth, that justice, swift and terrible, may at length fall on the head of that unnatural step-dame, to whose wanton cruelty, griping avarice, and iron policy, she owes most of the wrongs which have weighed her down for centuries.

What will England say, when all these terrible witnesses shall appear against her, and when the ghosts of her countless murdered victims shall glare at her "with their fiery eye-balls?" What answer shall she give, when the long and dark roll of her iniquities towards Ireland, shall be unfolded before the judgment-seat of the most just, omnipotent, and allseeing God of heaven and earth? Will her diplomacy then profit her

*1. The Condition and Fate of England. By the author of "the Glory and Shame of England," (C. Edwards Lester.) 2 vols., 12mo. Second edition. New York: J. & H. G. Langley. 1843.

2. The Criminal History of the English Government, from the first massacre of the Irish to the poisoning of the Chinese. By Eugene Regnault. Translated from the French, with Notes by an American. 1 vol., 12mo. New York: Redfield. 1843.

anything? Will those cunning devices and that political legerdemain, by which, on this earth, she has so often succeeded in making "the worse appear the better cause," then avail her aught? No, no. The Lord will then tear from her brow the veil of hypocrisy which has so long concealed her hideous deformities; He will strip her of all disguise, and exhibit her as she is before the assembled world; for on that day "He will reveal the hidden things of darkness, and manifest the counsels of hearts."

One of the deepest thinkers of Christian antiquity has laid down the comprehensive philosophical maxim, that "God is patient, because he is eternal," — patiens, quia æternus. He can bide His time; He need be in no hurry; for He has a whole eternity to reward His friends, and a whole eternity to punish His enemies. A thousand years before Him are as one day which has passed: - time is as nothing; eternity is everything. The wrongs which He permits in time, He will redress in eternity. The injustice which He allows to go on, and the tears and blood which He permits to flow now, He will then remove and wipe away forever. Then shall "all things be made new;" then shall all evils be obliterated from the universe of God; then "shall all tears be wiped away from the eyes (of God's friends), and death shall be no more; nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more; for the former things will have passed away." Then shall the high be brought low, and the low be made high; the proud humbled, and the humble exalted. Then shall all social and political evils be obliterated, and the social and moral condition of mankind be equalized, and brought into perfect harmony with truth, and justice, and virtue.

And then shall proud England be humbled even unto the dust, and poor bleeding Ireland, which has been down-trodden by her for nearly seven centuries, be raised up from her lowliness, to the lofty eminence to which her noble virtues and her long sufferings have entitled her. This is no mere flight of elevated fancy; it is a solemn and sober religious view of a subject invested with an all-absorbing interest.

The two writers whom we are reviewing, give strong expression to the indignant feelings of large masses of persons in America and France, awakened by the iniquitous policy of England, both domestic and foreign. They both trace the mischievous influence of English legislation on the happiness of large portions of her own exuberant population, as well as the wickedness of English diplomacy in regard to other nations; and they both devote separate books or chapters to the aggravated wrongs of Ireland under English misrule. They deal not in declamation; they strongly appeal to unquestionable facts. They paint England in her towering greatness and in her burning shame; they prove, by evidence which cannot be answered, that she has become great by employing the most unhallowed means, and that her glory is mainly built upon the impoverishment, the degradation, and the ruin of her own subjects at home and abroad, on 1 Apocalypse xxi, 4.

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