Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/50

extortion, perjury prevailed. In all the public offices peculation and plunder were reduced to system openly avowed and acted upon. The commissioners at the different boards were as regularly fee'd by those who had business to transact with them as they were paid by Government. But the Government itself was the great debauchee. There was no job too gross, no proceeding so licentious, no abuse of power or patronage so glaring, to which its active agency or tacit sanction was not extended. The Church was in perfect keeping with the State; the public offices were dens of thieves; the courts of justice, with their purlieus, were sinks of corruption; and the grand juries throughout the country invited by their practice and example the suitors or claimants at every court of assize in Ireland to disregard both truth and justice, to commit perjury, and to plunder or oppress their neighbour. There is no exaggeration—no high colouring in the foregoing statement. The truth of every portion of it is either already recorded in evidence reported to Parliament, or could be proved by ten thousand living witnesses. This then being till lately the state of Ireland, and of the administration of all her public affairs, it is no wonder that men doubt whether money could be levied equitably, and expended honestly and impartially, even for the benefit of the poor. Let it, however, be considered, and in the first place, that, until within a few years past, an exceedingly small fraction of the people of this country held exclusive possession of the administration of public business in all its diversity and ramifications. That fraction of the people lived by their offices, pensions, sinecures, or employments—they alone constituted society in Ireland—they were all sharers alike in oppression, and each took his portion of the spoil produced by it. They were not ashamed of each other, for no man blushes at his own theft in a company of thieves. There was no Government to exercise control. The business of Government was to divide among them their ill-gotten store. There was no court to which they could be cited, for they themselves filled the bench