ABSTRACT
In the meantime, besides the prolonged and unforeseen resistance of the protectionists, there were other and unexpected causes at work, which equally or perhaps even more powerfully tended to the fulfilment of the scheme of delay, which Lord George Bentinck had recommended his friends to adopt and encourage. In the latter months of the year 1845 there broke out in some of the counties of Ireland one of those series of outrages which have hitherto periodically occurred in districts of that country. The barbarous distempers had their origin in the tenure of land in Ireland and in the modes of its occupation. A combination of causes, political, social, and economical, had for more than a century unduly stimulated the population of a country which had no considerable resources except in the soil. Whig government proposed for the adoption of parliament measures which would suspend the constitution of Ireland, and which are generally known by the name of coercion acts.
