mpelled to join the insurgent ranks, busy in the
work of destruction and intimidation; when each evening brought the
work of havoc to a temporary close, they laid them down to rest where
the darkness overtook them. The roads were thus continually blockaded,
and those who, under cover of the night, sought to obtain aid and
assistance from less disturbed districts, were often interrupted and
turned back by bodies of these men. Authority was at an end, and a
large extensive district was completely at the mercy of reckless
multitudes, burning to avenge the sufferings of the past, and bent on
preventing, as they thought, a recurrence of them in future. The very
towns were in their hands; "in an evil hour" a vast body of insurgents
was "admitted" into one of the largest mercantile towns of the
kingdom, where they pillaged and laid waste in every direction. In
another town of the district a fearful riot was put down by force,
some of the leaders of the mob being shot dead while heading a charge
upon the military. The ascendancy of the law was at length asserted;
many arrests took place; the jails were crowded with prisoners; and
the multitudes without, deserted by those to whom they had looked up
for advice, their friends in prison, with the unknown terrors of the
law suspended over them, probably then felt that, miserable and lost
as they had been before, they had now fallen even lower in the scale
of human misery. Criminal proceedings were quickly instituted. Several
commissions were sent down to the districts in which these
disturbances had take place, in order that the offenders might meet
with _speedy_ punishment. The law officers of the crown, with many and
able assistants, in person conducted the proceedings. Temperate, mild,
dignified, and forbearing was their demeanour; in no case was the
individual the object of prosecution; it was the _crime_, through the
person of the criminal, against which the government proceeded. No
feelings of a personal nature were there exhibited; and a mild, but
firm, as it were, a parental correction of erring and misguided
children, seemed to be the sole object of those who then represented
the government. Conviction was heaped upon conviction--sentence
followed sentence--the miserable tool was distinguished from the man
who made him what he was--the active emissary, the secret conspirator,
also received each their proportionate amount of punishment. True, a
few of the more cautious and cr