those days; and it is needless; for there is no controversy about the levity of the Irish mind in regard to bloodshed. Whether it was owing to constitution, to their religion, to their political position, or their historical training, or all these together, the brutal levity with which life was taken by the agents, and under the orders, of secret societies is undisputed on all hands. What a lifetime of anguish had to be endured by a lady whose fate was mourned by a wide circle of my personal friends of the last generation. She had ridden over from her own home, in a rural district of Ireland, to visit her father and mother. She was sauntering on the lawn with them, when a party of men came up to them, and shot her father, who died instantly. While she was kneeling beside him, and weeping over him, the ruffians called out to her:
“Ah! you are crying, are you? You are making a piece of work about that, are you? You had better go home, and you will find something more to cry for there.”
She got home as fast as horse could carry her, and found her husband lying dead on his lawn. This is enough. The leaders and agents of Ribbon societies were never spoken of as forming a part of our civilisation; and the savage within was not covered with a fair skin of pretension. In estimating our position and progress as a human society, we have never included Irish agrarian conspirators as an element in the case. So we may pass on from them.
These incidents remind us, however, of the next manifestation, in which Ireland and Scotland were at least as much concerned as England. One of the most creditable facts in O’Connell’s life is the courage and steadiness with which he denounced and opposed the Trades’-Union tyranny of his time. He gave evidence which was full and out-spoken against a considerable number of working-men in Dublin,—the very stronghold of his influence at that time. The men, who menaced all citizens who should condemn their secret organisation, and its results of vitriol-throwing, beating to death, shooting, and stabbing, took care to let O’Connell know that he would have them for enemies if he did them any harm: but he went en telling what he knew, and saying what he thought. He said what he thought of such lovers of liberty as those who waylaid their neighbours with bludgeons, and beat them within an inch of their lives. He denounced with his utmost force the assassins who hid behind lamp-posts and in archways, to throw vitriol in the eyes of comrades or strangers who simply used their right of working for such wages as they and their employers could agree on. This was the lowest phase of the murderousness of my time. It is difficult, to be sure, to graduate the condemnation when such acts are in question as wife-murder, child-murder, and murder in the course of burglary: but looking at all the kinds, from every point of view, I think these trades-union murders are the very vilest and most revolting.—And these are the murders which distinguish Sheffield at this day.
One singular moralist, I am aware, has lately said that he prefers the condition of a Union-ridden society like that of Sheffield, with its “atrocious” crime, to that of a poverty-stricken one in which poor needlewomen abound. As I am not aware that anybody agrees with him,—unless it be Union-leaders,—I need not argue the matter here. I mention it only because it seems to indicate that our liberties, and the very principles of liberty, are in danger; in as far as socialistic influence extends. Wherever individual freedom is overborne by socialistic authority, the tyranny bears hardest on the men best fitted for independent action; and it invariably leads on to outrage. In the Unions denounced by O’Connell, the most energetic men who were not bought by office, honour, and profit, were the slaves and victims of the rest. Some were blinded, some were killed, some were transported; and the rest were kept like a toad under a harrow. So it has been, and now is, at Sheffield: and the consequence is, that the best part of the trade of the town has departed to places where industry is more free, where capital has its full rights, and where men can accordingly give their minds to the improvement of their manufacture. Under the consciousness of deterioration of character and reputation, the place has lost dignity and temper. The capitalists are exasperated at the restrictions imposed upon their manufacture by the dictators of the working body: the working-men are slaves as the only alternative to being victims of violence; and the infernal machine is in use, from time to time, to confirm the abjectness of a working class who dare not assert,—much less use,—the commonest right of manhood and citizenship. If the machine blinds and murders innocent women, as in the recent case, it is the more effectual:—husbands, fathers, and brothers may be made more obedient by it.
One is tempted to ask, by the way, whether intellectual deficiency may not have something to do with such practices. Must there not be a torpid imagination in the case? Could so many infernal machines, and so much vitriol have been; thrown, if the perpetrators, or the superiors who ordered the assault, had conceived of what it is to have the eyes burnt out, or bed or clothes burning about one’s ears? Have they ever thought of what the hospital nurse sees and hears, when the sufferer survives for a time?—the moans and restlessness of agony,—the despair at the prospect of blindness or other helplessness,—the misery at the thought of the workhouse for the little children, made orphans by such cruelty? Has it ever occurred to the perpetrators what they themselves should feel on such a bed of pain, thrown there by a dastardly assassin?
But I fear we must not attribute too much to this cause or occasion. For one case of penitence,—of horror and grief excited in the perpetrator by the spectacle of what has been done, we hear of a score in which the assassin is, when caught, indifferent, or worse. In the recent case—that of the 23rd ult.—the fellow who was accused by the chief sufferer showed no feeling whatever at witnessing the agonies of the two women whom he had put to a painful death. And here it is that we find the savage under the skin of civilisation. We find ourselves in the presence of that levity about human life which belongs to the undeveloped
