pinions. Thousands of them are ignorant that ever such a thing as a
penal code existed; yet the feeling against law survives, although the
source from which it has been transmitted may be forgotten. This will
easily account for much of the political violence and crime which
moments of great excitement produce among us; nor need we feel surprised
that this state of things should be continued, to the manifest injury
of the people themselves, by the baneful effects of agitation.

The period, therefore, for putting the character of our country fairly
upon, its trial has not yet arrived; although we are willing to take the
Irishman as we find him; nor would we shrink even at the present moment
from comparing him with any of his neighbors. His political sins and
their consequences were left him as an heirloom, and result from a state
of things which he himself did not occasion. Setting these aside, where
is the man to be found in any country who has carried with him through
all his privations and penalties so many of the best virtues of our
nature? In other countries the man who commits a great crime is always
a great criminal, and the whole heart is hardened and debased, but it
is not so in Ireland. The agrarian and political outrage is often
perpetrated by men who possess the best virtues of humanity, and whose
hearts as individuals actually abhor the crime. The moral standard here
is no doubt dreadfully erroneous, and until a correct and Christian one,
emanating from a better system of education, shall be substituted for
it, it will, with a people who so think and feel, be impossible utterly
to prevent the occurrence of these great evils. We must wait for thirty
or forty years, that is, until the rising or perhaps the subsequent
generation shall be educated out of these wild and destructive
prejudices, before we can fully estimate the degree of excellence to
which our national character may arrive. In my own youth, and I am
now only forty-four years, I do not remember a single school under the
immediate superintendence of either priest or parson, and that in a
parish the extent of which is, I dare say, ten miles by eight. The
instruction of the children was altogether a matter in which no clergy
of any creed took an interest. This was left altogether to hedge
schoolmasters, a class of men who, with few exceptions, bestowed such an
education upon the people as is sufficient almost, in the absence of all
other causes, to acco