[577] _Sway_.--An important instance of how the memory or tradition of
past wrongs excites men to seize the first opportunity of revenge, if
not of redress, has occurred in our own times. It is a circumstance
which should be very carefully pondered by statesmen who have the real
interest of the whole nation at heart. It is a circumstance, as a sample
of many other similar cases, which should be known to every Englishman
who wishes to understand the cause of "Irish disturbances." One of the
men who was shot by the police during the late Fenian outbreak in
Ireland, was a respectable farmer named Peter Crowley. His history tells
the motive for which he risked and lost his life. His grandfather had
been outlawed in the rebellion of '98. His uncle, Father Peter O'Neill,
had been imprisoned and _flogged most barbarously, with circumstances of
peculiar cruelty_, in Cork, in the year 1798. The memory of the insult
and injury done to a priest, who was entirely guiltless of the crimes
with which he was charged, left a legacy of bitterness and hatred of
Saxon rule in the whole family, which, unhappily, religion failed to
eradicate. Peter Crowley was a sober, industrious, steady man, and his
parish priest, who attended his deathbed, pronounced his end "most happy
and edifying." Three clergymen and a procession of young men, women, and
children, scattering flowers before the coffin, and bearing green
boughs, attended his remains to the grave. He was mourned as a patriot,
who had loved his country, not wisely, but too well; and it was believed
that his motive for joining the Fenian ranks was less from a desire of
revenge, which would have been sinful, than from a mistaken idea of
freeing his country from a repetition of the cruelties of '98, and from
her present grievances.

[578] _Sufferer_.--Plowden, _Hist_. p. 102.

[579] _Sanction_.--His son says: "His estimate of the people led him to
appreciate justly the liveliness of their parts. But while he knew their
vices, and the origin of them, he knew that there was in their character
much of the generosity and warmth of feeling which made them acutely
sensitive when they were treated considerately and kindly. His judgment
of the upper classes of society, and of the purity and wisdom of the
government, was less favorable. He saw that the gentry were imperfectly
educated; that they were devoted to the pursuits of pleasure and
political intrigue; and that they were ignorant or neglectfu