nness of a principle, at once so disgraceful to literature and so
repugnant to truth. These thin-skinned gentlemen are of opinion that the
crime itself is a matter of trivial importance compared to the fact of
its becoming known, and that provided the outside of the platter is kept
clean, it matters not how filthy it may be within.

In the days of my boyhood and early life, the people of Ireland were,
generally speaking, an honest, candid, faithful, and grateful people,
who loved truth, and felt the practical influence of religious feeling
strongly, but so dishonest and degrading has been the long curse of
agitation, to which forms of it their moral and social principles have
been exposed, that there probably could not be found in any country,
an instance in which the virtues of the whole people have been so
completely debauched and contaminated (I do not say voluntarily), as
those of the Irish have been by the leading advocates of repeal. The
degeneracy of character, occasioned by those tampering with our national
virtues, is such as we shall not recover from these thirty years to
come. Many of our best, mellow-toned, old virtues, that pass in an
unbroken link of hereditary beauty from father to son, and from family
to family, like some sacred and inestimable heirloom, at once reverenced
and loved, are all gone--such as our love of truth, our simple devotion
and patriarchal piety, our sincerity in all social intercourse, and
others of the same stamp; whilst little else is left us but a barren
catalogue of broken and dishonest promises, and the consciousness of
having been at once fleeced and laughed at. And it would be well if we
could stop here, but truth forces us onward. The Irishman of the present
day--the creature of agitation--is neither honest, nor candid, nor
manly, nor generous, but a poor, skulking dupe, at once slavish
and insolent, offensive and cowardly--who carries, as a necessary
consequence, the principles of political dishonesty into the practices
of private life, and is consequently disingenuous and fraudulent.

Let me not be misunderstood. I love truth; and have never been either
afraid or ashamed to speak it; and I trust I never shall. I now allude
to the principles of Conciliation Hall, and the system by which they
were led. I feel bound, however, to exempt the party called Young
Irelanders from having had any participation in bringing about results
so disastrous to the best moral interests of the