"
Whiteboyism, outrage and lawlessness spread over the face of the
country, and, as Lord Clare reminded Parliament, "session after session
have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty
to repress the horrible excesses of the mass of your people." It has
been made a charge against the Union that during some disturbed periods
of the nineteenth century the United Parliament had to pass "Coercion"
Acts at the rate of nearly one every session. The complainants should
look nearer home and they would find from the records of the Irish
Legislature that during the "halcyon" days of "Grattan's
Parliament"--the eighteen years between 1782 and the Union--no less than
fifty-four Coercion Acts were passed, some of them of a thoroughness and
ferocity quite unknown in later legislation. The close of the nineteenth
century and the opening of the twentieth were, in reality, in spite of a
certain amount of agrarian crime, organised and subsidised from abroad,
a period of much greater peace and more widespread prosperity than the
bloodstained years that marked the close of the eighteenth century--and
of the Irish Parliament.
Pages:
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88