e law will be able to prevail; because it must be in the
experience of many of you that it is unhappily in the power of a few
persons who engage in this system of nightly invasion of houses to
multiply themselves, apparently by means of terror and intimidation,
although at the same time there can be no doubt that, on account of
interval of distances, and for many such reasons, there must be many
such combinations in this country, acting entirely independent of each
other.

'No person can be at a loss to understand the misery and suffering that
arises from a state of crime; but perhaps all persons in the community
do not equally understand one form of consequence to material prosperity
that results from it. I have before me a document that contains most
terribly significant evidence of mischief, alike to all classes of the
community, that results from crime and a state of social disturbance. I
have a return of malicious injuries which form the subject of
presentment at these Assizes, in number, I understand, exceeding all
former precedent. There are no less than eighty-six presentments,
representing all forms of wicked outrage upon property, a tempest--I
might say without exaggeration, a tempest--of violence and crime that
has swept over a considerable portion of this county. The claims amount
to L2700, with the result that the Grand Jury had presented upon a
certain part of this county L1250, exercising apparently the greatest
care and discrimination in reducing the amount of the claims, and this
L1250 was not put upon the whole county, but on certain parts of the
county, and the amount at the very least aggravated in a most serious
degree the weight of taxation that falls upon the ratepayers of the
County Kerry, deepening the difficulties that all classes alike must
experience from the depression of the times, and from the other burdens
they have to meet in providing against the demands that are made upon
them.

'But, of course, you can easily understand that these things do not at
all give you any idea of other forms of material injury that arise from
crime and disturbance, in the loss of employment and the discouragement
of capital, the injury to trade, and the multiplied consequences of all
kinds detrimental to the community that arise from insecurity to
personal property and life. And to all those evils we have to add
another, and perhaps the worst of all--that of which you are all
conscious, of which experience