necessary; the re-enactment of the penal code would not be sufficient.  They must abolish trial by jury, or, at least, incapacitate Catholics from sitting on juries. 2,000,000 of Protestants must have a complete monopoly of power and privilege in a country which contained 5,000,000 of Catholics, who were in most of the country four to one—­in some districts twenty to one—­of the Protestants.  True, there were difficulties in the way of a settlement.  ‘But,’ asked Sir Robert Peel, ’what great measure, which has stamped its name upon the era, has ever been carried without difficulty?

At the present moment there is a loud cry in the English press for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and for the old remedy, coercion.  Those who raise the cry would do well to read Mr. Shiel’s speech at the Clare election in 1828.  He said:—­

’We have put a great engine into action, and applied the entire force of that powerful machinery which the law has placed under our control.  We are masters of the passions of the people, and we have employed our dominion with a terrible effect.  But, sir, do you, or does any man here, imagine that we could have acquired this formidable ability to sunder the strongest ties by which the different classes of society are fastened, unless we found the materials of excitement in the state of society itself?  Do you think that Daniel O’Connell has himself, and by the single powers of his own mind, unaided by any external co-operation, brought the country to this great crisis of agitation?  Mr. O’Connell, with all his talent for excitation, would have been utterly powerless and incapable, unless he had been allied with a great conspirator against the public peace; and I will tell you who that confederate is—­it is the law of the land itself that has been Mr. O’Connell’s main associate, and that ought to be denounced as the mighty agitator of Ireland.  The rod of oppression is the wand of this enchanter, and the book of his spells is the penal code?  Break the wand of this political Prospero, and take from him the volume of his magic, and he will evoke the spirits which are now under his control no longer.  But why should I have recourse to illustration, which may be accounted fantastical, in order to elucidate what is in itself so plain and obvious?  Protestant gentlemen, who do me the honour to listen to me, look, I pray you, a little dispassionately at the real causes of the events which have taken place amongst you....  In no other country, except in this, would such a revolution have been effected.  Wherefore?  Because in no other country are the people divided by the law from their superiors, and cast into the hands of a set of men who are supplied with the means of national excitement by the system of government under which we live.  Surely, no man can believe that such an anomalous body as the Catholic Association could exist excepting in a community that has been alienated from the state by the state itself.