“I assure you,” he replied, “I am almost as much at a loss, Toby, to give you a satisfactory answer, as if you asked me the elevation of the highest mountain on the moon; and I believe you would find equal difficulty in ascertaining the cause of their feuds from the factions themselves.  I really am convinced they know not, nor, if I rightly understand them, do they much care.  Their object is to fight, and the turning of a straw will at any time furnish them with sufficient grounds for that.  I do not think, after all, that the enmity between them is purery personal:  they do not hate each other individually; but having originally had one quarrel upon some trifling occasion, the beaten party cannot bear the stigma of defeat without another trial of strength.  Then, if they succeed, the onus of retrieving lost credit is thrown upon the party that was formerly victorious.  If they fail a second time, the double triumph of their conquerors excites them to a greater determination to throw off the additional disgrace; and this species of alternation perpetuates the evil.

“These habits, however, familiarize our peasantry to acts of outrage and violence—­the bad passions are cultivated and nourished, until crimes, which peaceable men look upon with fear and horror, lose their real magnitude and deformity in the eyes of Irishmen.  I believe this kind of undefined hatred between either parties or nations, is the most dangerous and fatal spirit which can pervade any portion of society.  If you hate a man for an obvious and palpable injury, it is likely that when he cancels that injury by an act of subsequent kindness, accompanied by an exhibition of sincere sorrow, you will cease to look upon him as your enemy; but where the hatred is such that, while feeling you cannot, on a sober examination of your heart, account for it, there is little hope that you will ever be able to stifle the enmity that you entertain against him.  This, however, in politics and religion, is what is frequently designated as principle—­a word on which men, possessing higher and greater advantages than the poor ignorant peasantry of Ireland, pride themselves.  In sects and parties, we may mark its effects among all ranks and nations.  I therefore, seldom wish, Toby, to hear a man assert that he is of this party or that, from principle; for I am usually inclined to suspect that he is not, in this case, influenced by conviction.

“Kelly was a man who, but for these scandalous proceedings among us, might have been now alive and happy.  Although his temperament was warm, yet that warmth communicated itself to his good as well as to his evil qualities.  In the beginning his family were not attached to any faction—­and when I use the word faction, it is in contradistinction to the word party—­for faction, you know, is applied to a feud or grudge between Roman Catholics exclusively.  But when he was young, he ardently attached himself to the Murphys; and, having continued among them until manhood, he could not abandon them, consistently with that sense of mistaken honor which forms so prominent a feature in the character of the Irish peasantry.  But although the Kellys were not faction-men, they were bitter party-men, being the ringleaders of every quarrel Which took place between the Catholics and Protestants, or, I should rather say, between the Orangemen and Whiteboys.