assassinations were then perpetrated. Mr Sidney Herbert is reported, with great naïveté, and innocently enough, to have offered the following reasons for the omission:--"He could show from proofs before him, that the murders which were committed in broad day were, generally speaking, murders perpetrated against persons in the higher ranks of life; and that, on the other hand, the night murders were committed on the poor and defenceless; and for this reason,--the rich man lived in a house carefully secured, with his servants well armed, his windows barricaded, and every thing about it capable of standing a siege; _and when such a man was murdered it was usually in the open day; perhaps fired at from a hedge when he was returning from the quarter sessions, or some other duty_. But the poor man, who lived in a wretched thatched cottage, with the door and window ill secured--that man was attacked at night, shots were fired into his house, and incendiarism was almost solely confined to him, because he was poor and defenceless--he had no servants to repel the invasion of what ought to be his castle; and, therefore, he maintained that an obvious distinction must be made between the night class of murders, which especially required their interference, and those that were committed in broad day. The one class of victims called much more loudly for protection than did the other."--(Hear.) Here we have it unreservedly stated, that no restriction is sought to be imposed upon the evil-disposed by day--merely because none are then murdered but landlords, who cannot with convenience be come at by night; but, as if more fully to show the little sympathy which exists between the Irish proprietors and the government, the Secretary at War asks, in a subsequent passage, "How many murders of landlords had there been? _Or rather, he should say, how few had there been?_ God knew he was not underrating the number who had thus lost their lives, but he asked the House to consider how few landlords had been murdered, in comparison with the whole number which had taken place in the five counties in which outrage had been so conspicuous. In these five counties there had been the following offences:--Firing at the person, 85; incendiarism, 139; threatening witnesses, 1043; firing into dwelling-houses, 93. Now, of all these, how many were attacks on landlords? There was Mr Gloster, Mr M'Leod, Mr Hoskins, Mr Carrick, Mr Booth, and some others; but they formed no comparison to the number of poor and defenceless."