possessed of large landed properties, were very generally
insolvent, and many estates did not produce food
enough to maintain the animals upon them.—The
Marquis of LANSDOWNE was happy to say that matters
were improving. Returns made up to the 5th of January
last, showed a diminution of expenditure upon relief of
fully one-third. Affairs might right themselves in time
without any extraordinary measures being necessary.
All the papers asked for, and many others on the same
subject, would be laid on the table in the course of a
few days.

On Monday the 18th, Lord STANLEY brought forward
his charges against the Lord Lieutenant and the Lord
Chancellor of Ireland for their official conduct in regard
to The Collision at Dolly's Brae. The house was
uncommonly full; many ladies were present, and the
space below the bar for members of the House of
Commons was crowded to suffocation. Lord Stanley
prefaced his motion (which was formally for the production
of papers, but was virtually for a vote of censure of the
government) by a speech of three hours' duration. He
premised that he did not wish to cast any imputation
upon Lord Clarendon's motive; being satisfied that on
this occasion, as on every other in the period during
which the Lord Lieutenant had been in his high office,
his main desire had been to act in consistency with his
own duty and for the welfare and tranquillity of Ireland.
In proof of Lord Stanley's own aversion to party
processions in Ireland, he reminded their lordships that he
was the individual minister who brought in the
Processions Act, which continued in healthful operation
from 1832 to 1844. Rapidly recalling the facts of the
collision on the 12th of July, he also admitted that at
the end of the unfortunate transaction there did occur
scenes of retaliation and retribution such as he could
neither palliate nor justify. He recounted the
commissioning of Mr. Berwick; the refusal by the Castlewellan
magistrates to take the informations proffered at Sessions;
the dismissal of Lord Roden and the Messrs. William
and Francis Beers from the magistracy. Admitting,
perhaps, a primâ facie case against Mr. William Beers,
he could make out no shadow of charge against Mr.
Francis Beers, whom Mr. Berwick himself reports to
have co-operated with the stipendiary magistrate in
preventing collision, and to have been most active in
restoring peace and saving life afterwards. But if he
admitted all the facts, he found no justification for the
course pursued. The magistrates were justified in
supposing that the procession was legal: they consulted the
government itself, and learned that party processions as
such were not illegal since the expiry of the Processions
Act; the government stipendiary magistrates
themselves acted on that opinion; and though the
Government was expressly warned oftener than once that a
collision was to be apprehended on this occasion, they
took not a step, such as former governments had taken,
to warn the magistrates of their duty, or to inhibit
them from that which they are now dismissed for having
sanctioned. As military and police attended the
procession, instead of preventing it, there wanted no fact
to make the magistrates certain that their proceedings
were under the very sanction and protection of government.
The commission issued to Mr. Berwick was
unconstitutional: it presumed a power of delegating
functions which the Lord Lieutenant does not possess.
Mr. Berwick had no right to administer an oath; the
witnesses before him could not be indicted for perjury,
and they were throwing out calumnies on the characters
of individuals without that check. In professing to lay
before the Lord Lieutenant the "material" portion
of the evidence, he garbled and perverted it. For
example he omitted the essential fact that Mr. W.
Beers remonstrated with the Orangemen on their
turning to repel the attack made by the Ribandmen;
he related how an idiot was barbarously killed by the
beating in of his skull,—the fact being that a bullet
was the cause of death, and troops of horse had passed
over the man's body; he considered it doubtful which
party it was that fired the squib and fired the first two
shots,—although a number of the soldiery unconnected
with that part of the country swore positively they saw
the squib fired on the hill, and then saw two Ribandmen
fire the first two shots, the only evidence in
contradiction being that of persons whom he elsewhere
says he did not believe. These facts appear in detail
from the sworn verbatim report of a short-hand writer
who attended the investigation. The Lord Lieutenant
recommended that the three magistrates should be
dismissed, for reasons which he stated; the Lord
Chancellor executed the dismissal as if he had been a mere
ministerial officer, without inquiry or deliberation. Mr.
Berwick had laid down the law, that all bodies of men
assembled under circumstances to excite terror and
endanger the public peace are illegal and should be
suppressed; and that any body of private persons
combined even for an innocent and lawful object, proceeding
to effect their object with a determination to resist
opposers by force, is dangerous to the public peace, and
the abettors are answerable: this doctrine is a monstrous
contradiction to the fundamental principle that every
Englishman may defend himself, his family, and
property, by numbers and arms. Nothing would have
been easier than to apply to the Court of Queen's Bench
for a mandamus compelling the magistrates to receive
the informations; but to this day no such application
has been made, and to this day the informations are
refused. This fact proves, beyond doubt, that the
magistrates are deemed to have made a proper exercise
of their legal discretion in refusing the informations;
and, if they have so acted, that the Court of Queen's
Bench would not question their discretion, the government
having acted with tyranny and injustice in
dismissing them.—Lord CLARENDON prefaced his "few
remarks upon the speech of his noble friend" by a
protest that his attendance in Parliament should not be
considered a precedent for a Lord Lieutenant to appear
there in person to answer attacks upon his administration.
He then went over the ground traversed by Lord
Stanley, with explanatory and corrective statements.
Since the expiry of the Processions Act, party
processions had been looked upon not as necessarily or a
priori, illegal, but liable to become so according to the
character they assume. It was the opinion of every
sound lawyer, that if they inspired reasonable terror
among the peaceable, they were illegal. The Messieurs
Beers deliberately prearranged and led a procession,
though they had twelve months' notice that it would
probably induce a breach of the peace. The government
had the fullest private information as regarding Dolly's
Brae, and expected a great demonstration on the 12th
of July; but they had no information of the special
intentions in particular localities. Lord Clarendon
himself had superintended the arrangements for preventing
disturbance; sending down experienced police
inspectors, a body of that force, and a body of military.
The procession marched; after it had passed Dolly's
Brae the first time, the stipendiary magistrates became
apprehensive of collision. Mr. Fitzmaurice urged Lord
Roden to prevent the return of the procession by the
same way; but no effort was made by either Lord Roden
or the Messieurs Beers to prevent it, although the latter
admitted that he could perhaps have prevented it. It
must be left to the local magistracy to determine what
is necessary for conserving the peace, the government
supplying the means: if they prearrange and sanction
that which leads to danger, and afterwards, when the
danger is pointed out, do nothing to prevent it, they are
unworthy to remain in the commission of the peace.
As to the nature of Mr. Berwick's inquiry, it had been
sanctioned not only by successive governments and
Parliaments, but by Lord Stanley himself, in the
Maghery and Portglenone cases, when he was Irish
Secretary, in 1830-1832. Moreover, Mr. Berwick was
himself put in the commission of the peace. The Lord
Chancellor was recommended to dismiss the
magistrates; and he was enabled to act on that
recommendation the same day, because he had himself come
to the determination to do so, on investigation of proofs.
The weight of those proofs was not impeached by
criticism of Mr. Berwick's report in comparison with the
short-hand notes. The government had information
that those notes were grossly false, and that it had
been falsely sworn that they were taken in court;
and Lord Clarendon lamented that upon evidence
such as this a man of high judicial character and
of unimpeachable conduct should have been charged