l Plunket, the ablest advocate of the Papists, was
compelled, by a similar necessity, to write a long official letter, in
which he stated--"That he feared in five or six counties, great numbers
indeed of the lower classes had been involved in the conspiracy; some of
them from a love of enterprise and ready disposition for mischief; some
of them on a principle of counteraction to associations of an opposite
description; but most of them, he should hope, from terror on the one
hand, and the _expectation of impunity_ on the other." There was the
point, which no man comprehended better in theory than this clever
law-officer, and none better in practice than the Popish peasant. "This
_expectation_, however," he observes, "must now be effectually removed,
and the terror of the law, I trust, be substituted in place of the
terror of the conspirators." Adding, "your Excellency will observe with
regret, that the association has been founded on a principle of
_religious exclusion!_"

Such had been the fruit of concession. The opposite plan, so often
suggested, and so essentially necessary, was then tried; and its fruits
too followed. Almost the whole of Ireland became instantly
tranquillized; men were no longer murdered in open day; cattle no longer
maimed; houses no longer burned. The Marquess thus writes the English
government:--"During the summer and autumn of 1822, the measures
sanctioned by Parliament for the restoration of tranquillity, combined
with other causes, have produced such a degree of quiet, that no
necessity existed for my _usual_ communications."

We pass rapidly over the contemptible squabbles of the party mobs which
fill up the modern history of Irish politics, and which must have deeply
disgusted a statesman who had seen public life on the stately scale of
Indian government and English administration. But he was now far
advanced in years, and he was betrayed into the absurdity of suffering
these squabbles to reach to himself. The decoration of the statue of
William the Third, in one of the principal streets of the city, on his
birthday, the 4th of November, had been an annual custom for upwards of
a hundred years. But now the Papists resolved to regard the placing of a
few knots of orange riband on this equestrian figure as a matter of
personal offence, and prohibited the decoration. A patrol of horse
surrounded the statue, and the decoration could not be accomplished. A
letter from the secretary approved of