t by their peers, whose verdicts, from sympathy or
terror, were usually found to baffle justice.

These Coercion Acts were effectual; they invariably obtained their end,
and the proclaimed districts became tranquil. But they were an affair
of police, not of government; essentially temporary, their effect was
almost as transient as their sway, and as they were never accompanied
with any deep and sincere attempt to cope with the social circumstances
which produced disorder, the recurrence of the chronic anarchy was
merely an affair of time. Whether it were that they did not sufficiently
apprehend the causes, or that they shrank from a solution which must
bring them in contact with the millions of a surplus population, there
seems always to have been an understanding between the public men
of both parties, that the Irish difficulty should be deemed a purely
political, or at the utmost a religious one. And even so late as 1846,
no less a personage than the present chief secretary, put forward by
his party to oppose an Irish Coercion Bill which themselves had loudly
called for, declared that he could not sanction its penal enactments
unless they were accompanied by the remedial measures that were
necessary, to wit, an Irish Franchise Bill, and a Bill for the amendment
of municipal corporations!

When Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, after a memorable opposition of ten
years, acceded to office, sustained by all the sympathies of the
country, his Irish policy, not sufficiently noticed amid the vast and
urgent questions with which he had immediately to deal, was, however, to
the political observer significant and interesting. As a mere matter of
party tactics, it was not for him too much to impute Irish disturbances
to political and religious causes, even if the accumulated experience
of the last ten years were not developing a conviction in his mind, that
the methods hitherto adopted to ensure the tranquillity of that country
were superficial and fallacious. His cabinet immediately recognized
a distinction between political and predial sources of disorder.
The first, they resolved into a mere system of agitation, no longer
justifiable by the circumstances, and this they determined to put down.
The second, they sought in the conditions under which land was occupied,
and these they determined to investigate. Hence, on the one hand, the
O'Connell prosecution: on the other, the Devon commission.

This was the bold and prudent policy of