is empty: one army is disembodied there is no good reason why the other should daringly continue to occupy its intrenchments.

The Catholic Association, during the course of the discussion, and in the body of the Bill itself, was visited with severe reprehension. The policy of this rebuke is not attempted to be attacked, or defended; it may have been one of those compromises to which public men are, by the very nature of their position, occasionally subjected; and for which the best apology will be found in the necessity to which they are compelled, for the purpose of pursuing some useful middle course, of sometimes conciliating the most opposite extremes. The distant spectator, uninfluenced by these motives, will regard the censure in a different light, and measure its justice by a far different standard. There is not, I believe, in the history of this or of the neighbouring countries, an instance of more extensive and perfect organization than the late Catholic Association. Its ramifications were as minute, as general, as connected, as the most complicated portion of the muscular system. In this country, the more prominent results, the

more obvious actions only, of the body were conspicuous. An election of Waterford or of Clare alone, evinced to the English people the existence of such a power; but they were for the greater part as ignorant of the principle and process of the movement, as the spectator who gazes on a steam-vessel from shore without inquiring into the properties or power of steam. It was only when the effect of these powerful impulses began to be felt by the entire community, that every class at last awoke to their causes, and commenced comparing them with their effects. But as usual in such abrupt investigations, men judged only after preconceived opinions. They squared every thing to their own creed.

The Association was supposed to be a mere tumultuary body, starting up from a chaos of confused and ungovernable elements, the creature of excitation, and with views as inconsistent with general constitutional liberty, and especially with the order and security of the British constitution, as any of those sudden assemblages of Catholics and Covenanters, which were flung together at the outset of the civil wars in either country, by the first fury of our religious dissen

tions. But this was judging rashly; the Catholic Association was a coalition of a very different order: it had a method in its madness, and an object in its tumult, which a close observer and a constant attention only could discern; it was not possible to combine in the same mass, greater powers of popular excitation, more undisputed sway over the popular heart, and more minute attention to the nice machinery by which the details of public business (the business of many millions of men) require to be conducted. Neither was it a mere ebullition from the rank passions and the turbulent ambition of modern times: it was of long, and slow, and patient growth; its strength was not known, until it had been brought into direct collision with the government; it was not even fully appreciated by the very hands which wielded it, until its temper had been brought out by hostile attack. It was then suddenly perceived, that a body had been growing up unnoticed, without the constitution, which might in its due season disturb from its foundations the constitution itself, co-extensive with the immense majority of the population, and reflecting, in its utmost energy,

the entire form and pressure of the popular

mind.

Of the power of this singular anomaly, surviving penal enactment, and flourishing in the midst of civil restriction, it is at present unnecessary to speak: the chain which bound its strength together, the magic life by which it lived, has passed away at the voice of a still more powerful enchantment-the confident expectation of immediate and entire justice. But it may not be without its interest and utility to trace the progress of its formation, and to show, by what sure though tardy progress, the omnipotence of public opinion is ultimately, though gradually, brought to bear upon the most unmanageable questions of public policy, and in its good time to work those mighty moral changes in the national mind, which to the unphilosophic observer appear little less than miraculous.

The Irish Catholic may look back with a just pride on the honourable efforts which have so well deserved their actual remuneration, and the English constitutional Protestant read with instruction and satisfaction a lesson, that will not cease with the moment, but guide him also in

the future struggles he may have to make for the restitution or improvement of national rights. In such a contest nothing is small; nothing is to be despised. Catholic emancipation, it will be seen, has not been achieved by a coup de main; liberty has not come to the Catholic by accident; nor is it, as has been falsely surmised, the gift of a few leaders; but its seeds have, year after year, been plentifully sown in the mind of a whole people, until the appointed moment for the sure and abundant harvest had fully arrived. The moral force of patient and unceasing effort in a just cause, confiding fully in the God of justice and its own might, has been adequately proved: the certainty of final triumph, when truth and reason are the combatants, is placed beyond a doubt: and if this great lesson, and no other, had been taught by the late struggle, it would have been well worth all the sacrifice and delay. Every day, the chance of regenerating a nation by the coarse expedients of physical force is, thank God! becoming less and less. There is every day a greater confidence in the power and efficacy of mere mind; there is every day a more firm assurance in the strength