'It is awful,' he declared in his rasping voice. 'What will Mr. Pitt say? He will withdraw your pensions, my poor gentlemen, unless you act with decision. Arm your vassals, my lords. The French will come and murder us in our beds. I vow the country is in danger. The Catholics must be shown their place.' That the country was in danger there could be little doubt; but it was not precisely from the side to which the crafty chancellor thought fit to point. Parliament met in solemn conclave, and did as it was told. Curran and a few others rose up in their places, solemnly protesting against a policy which sprang from a hidden fear of the lower orders. An Act of Indemnity was passed with regard to the proceedings in the north. Magistrates and petty officers were held to have behaved wisely in permitting cottages to be burnt in the name of religion, in allowing fathers of families to be kidnapped in the night, and spirited away no one might tell whither. A profound feeling of wrath was stirred over all the land by the passing of this, and the Insurrection Bill which allowed it; whereby, amongst other things, a power of arbitrary transportation was given to magistrates, and outrages made legal which till now had been accomplished in defiance of the law. People saw clearly that the majority of both Lords and Commons were merely the representatives of their own greed and their own venality; that nothing could free motherland from a vicious thraldom of unpatriotic selfishness but a reform of Parliament and a complete change in the system of Government. How was this to be accomplished? There was the knotty point. Was the threatened rising of the masses really inevitable? Could they accomplish their objects at all if France should refuse substantial help? Was Government deliberately acting for a wicked purpose, or was the crime merely the negative one of incapacity? Agitation-meetings blaming the executive were held about the country, at which, when he heard of them, my Lord Clare expressed his amazement, ingeniously stating in public that he was astonished at the mildness of the Viceroy in not severely punishing the agitators. Such a hint was not lost upon his amateur colonels and military magistrates. They began to exhibit renewed examples of vigorous zeal, destroying property at pleasure, searching houses for arms, treating the inhabitants with such brutality that women fell into convulsions and brought forth children before their time. A singular effect of these proceedings, which in itself spoke volumes, was a sudden moral reform among the peasantry. Men who had been drunken became reclaimed; fairs and markets were undisturbed by quarrelling; factions which had been at feud for centuries smoked the pipe of peace together. Hatred, kept down by fear, festered in the hearts of the children of the soil. It was felt that a moment was imminent when man might endure no more, when a down-trodden race must conquer its persecutors or seek relief