Note return — ON THE BEST MEANS OF ESTABLISHING A COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE BETWEEN THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS.

That we shall know when Parliament meets; and possibly not before. At present the attempts to explain, to reconcile, and, as it were, to construe the Government system of policy, is first almost neglecting the Irish sedition, and then (after half-a-year's sedentary and distant skirmishing, by means of Chancery letters) suddenly, on the 7th day of October, leaping into the arena armed cap-a-pie, dividing themselves like a bomb-shell amongst the conspirators, rending—shattering—pursuing to the right and to the left;—all attempts, we say, to harmonize that past quiescence (almost acquiescence) with this present demoniac energy, have seemed to the public either false or feeble, or in some way insufficient. Five such attempts we have noticed; and of the very best we may say that perhaps it tells the truth, but not the whole truth. First came the solution of a great morning journal—to the effect that Government had, knowingly and wilfully, altered their policy, treading back their own steps upon finding the inefficiency of gentler measures. On this view no harmonizing principle was called for; the discord existed confessedly, and the one course had been the palinode of the other. But such a theory is quite inadmissible to our minds; it tallies neither with the long-headed and comprehensive sagacity of Sir Robert Peel, nor with the spirit of simplicity, directness, and determination in the Duke of Wellington. Next came an evening paper, of high character for Conservative honesty and ability, which (having all along justified the past policy of vigilant neutrality) could not be supposed to acknowledge any fickleness in ministers: the time for moderation and indulgence, according to this journal, had now passed away: the season had arrived for law to display its terrors. Not in the Government, but in the conspirators had occurred the change: and so far—to the extent, namely, of taxing these conspirators with gradual increase of virulence—it may ultimately turn out that this journal is right. The fault for the present is—that the nature of the change, its signs and circumstances, were not specified or described. How, and by what memorable feature, did last June differ from this October? and what followed, by its false show of subtlety, discredited the whole explanation. It seems that notice was required of this change: in mere equity, proclamation must be made of the royal pleasure as to the Irish sedition: that was done in the Queen's speech on adjourning the two Houses. But time also must be granted for this proclamation to diffuse itself, and therefore it happened that the Clontarf meeting was selected for the coup d'essai of Government; in its new character for "handselling" the new system of rigour, this Clontarf assembly having fallen out just about six weeks from the Royal speech. But this attempt to establish a metaphysical relation between the time for issuing a threat, and the time for acting upon it, as though forty and two days made that act to be reasonable which would not have been so in twenty and one, being suited chiefly to the universities in Laputa, did not meet the approbation of our captious and beef-eating island: and this second solution also, we are obliged to say; was exploded as soon us it was heard. Thirdly, stepped forward one who promised to untie the knot upon a more familiar principle: the thunder was kept back for so many months in order to allow time for Mr O'Connell to show out in his true colours, on the hint of an old proverb, which observes—that a baboon, or other mischievous animal, when running up a scaffolding or a ship's tackling, exposes his most odious features the more as he is allowed to mount the higher. In that idea, there is certainly some truth. "Give him rope enough, and every knave will hang himself"—is an old adage, a useful adage, and often a consolatory one. The objection, in the case before us, is—that our Irish hero had shown himself already, and most redundantly, on occasions notorious to every body, both previously to 1829, (the year of Clare,) and subsequently. If, however, it should appear upon the trial of the several conspirators for seditious language, that they, or that any of them, had, by good affidavits, used indictable language in September, not having used it sooner, or having guarded it previously by more equivocal expressions, then it must be admitted that the spirit of this third explanation does apply itself to the case, though not in an extent to cover the entire range of the difficulty. But a fourth explanation would evade the necessity of showing any such difference in the actionable language held: according to this hypothesis, it was not for subjects to prosecute that the Government waited, but for strength enough to prosecute with effect, under circumstances which warned them to expect popular tumults. In this statement, also, there is probably much truth, indeed, it has now become evident that there is. Often we have heard it noticed by military critics as the one great calamity of Ireland, that in earlier days she had never been adequately conquered—not sufficiently for extirpating barbarism, or sufficiently for crushing the local temptations to resistance. Rebellion and barbarism are the two evils (and, since the Reformation, in alliance with a third evil—religious hostility to the empire) which have continually sustained themselves in Ireland, propagated their several curses from age to age, and at this moment equally point to a burden of misery in the forward direction for the Irish, and backwards to a burden of reproach for the English. More men applied to Ireland, more money and more determined legislation spent upon Ireland in times long past, would have saved England tenfold expenditure of all these elements in the three centuries immediately behind us, and possibly in that which is immediately a-head. Such men as Bishop Bedell, as Bishop Jeremy Taylor, or even as Bishop Berkeley, meeting in one generation and in one paternal council, would have made Ireland long ago, by colonization and by Protestantism, that civilized nation which, with all her advances in mechanic arts30 of education as yet she is not; would have made her that tractable nation, which, after all her lustrations by fire and blood, for her own misfortune she never has been; would have made her that strong arm of the empire, which hitherto, with all her teeming population, for the common misfortune of Europe she neither has been nor promises to be. By and through this neglect it is, that on the inner hearths of the Roman Catholic Irish, on the very altars of their lares and penates, burns for ever a sullen spark of disaffection to that imperial household, with which, nevertheless and for ever, their own lot is bound up for evil and for good; a spark always liable to be fanned by traitors—a spark for ever kindling into rebellion; and in this has lain perpetually a delusive encouragement to the hostility of Spain and France, whilst to her own children, it is the one great snare which besets their feet. This great evil of imperfect possession—if now it is almost past healing in its general operation as an engine of civilization, and as applied to the social training of the people—is nevertheless open to relief as respects any purpose of the Government, towards which there may be reason to anticipate a martial resistance. That part of the general policy fell naturally under the care of our present great Commander-in-chief. Of him it was that we spoke last month as watching Mr O'Connell's slightest movements, searching him and nailing him with his eye. We told the reader at the same time, that Government, as with good reason we believed, had not been idle during the summer; their work had proceeded in silence; but, upon any explosion or apprehension of popular tumult, it would be found that more had been done by a great deal, in the way of preparations, than the public was aware of. Barracks have every where been made technically defensible; in certain places they have been provisioned against sieges; forts have been strengthened; in critical situations redoubts, or other resorts of hurried retreat, or of known rendezvous in cases of surprise, have been provided; and in the most merciful spirit every advantage on the other side has been removed or diminished which could have held out encouragement to mutiny, or temptation to rebellion. Finally, on the destined moment arriving, on the casus foederis (whatever that were) emerging, in which the executive had predetermined to act, not the perfection of clockwork, not the very masterpieces of scenical art, can ever have exhibited a combined movement upon one central point—so swift, punctual, beautiful, harmonious, more soundless than an exhalation, more overwhelming than a deluge—as the display of military force in Dublin on Sunday the 8th of October. Without alarm, without warning—as if at the throwing up of a rocket in the dead of night, or at the summons of a signal gun—the great capital, almost as populous as Naples or Vienna, and far more dangerous in its excitement, found itself under military possession by a little army—so perfect in its appointments as to make resistance hopeless, and by that very hopelessness (as reconciling the most insubordinate to a necessity) making irritation impossible. Last month we warned Mr O'Connell of "the uplifted thunderbolt" suspended in the Jovian hands of the Wellesley, but ready to descend when the "dignus vindice nodus" should announce itself. And this, by the way, must have been the "thunderbolt," this military demonstration, which, in our blind spirit of prophecy doubtless, we saw dimly in the month of September last; so that we are disposed to recant our confession even of partial error as to the coming fortunes of Repeal, and to request that the reader will think of us as of very decent prophets. But, whether we were so or not, the Government (it is clear) acted in the prophetic spirit of military wisdom. "The prophetic eye of taste"—as a brilliant expression for that felicitous prolepsis by which the painter or the sculptor sees already in its rudiments what will be the final result of his labours—is a phrase which we are all acquainted with, and the spirit of prophecy, the far-stretching vision of sagacity, is analogously conspicuous in the arts of Government, military or political, when providing for the contingencies that may commence in pseudo-patriotism, or the possibilities that may terminate in rebellion. Whether Government saw those contingencies, whether Government calculated those possibilities in June last—that is one part of the general question which we have been discussing; and whether it was to a different estimate of such chances in summer and in autumn, or to a necessity for time in preparing against them, that we must ascribe the very different methods of the Government in dealing with the sedition at different periods—that is the other part of the question. But this is certain—that whether seeing and measuring from the first, or suddenly awakened to the danger of late—in any case, the Government has silently prepared all along; forestalling evils that possibly never were to arise, and shaping remedies for disasters which possibly to themselves appeared romantic. To provide for the worst, is an ordinary phrase, but what is the worst? Commonly it means the last calamity that experience suggests; but in the admirable arrangements of Government it meant the very worst that imagination could conceive—building upon treason at home in alliance with hostility from abroad. At a time when resistance seemed supremely improbable, yet, because amongst the headlong desperations of a confounded faction even this was possible, the ministers determined to deal with it as a certainty. Against the possible they provided as against the probable; against the least of probabilities as against the greatest. The very outside and remote extremities of what might be looked for in a civil war, seem to have been assumed as a basis in the calculations. And under that spirit of vista-searching prudence it was, that the Duke of Wellington saw what we have insisted on, and practically redressed it—viz. the defective military net-work by which England has ever spread her power over Ireland. "This must not be," the Duke said; "never again shall the blood of brave men be shed in superfluous struggles, nor the ground be strewed with supernumerary corpses—as happened in the rebellion of 1798—because forts were wanting and loopholed barracks to secure what had been won; because retreats were wanting to overawe what, for the moment, had been lost. Henceforth, and before there is a blushing in the dawn of that new rebellion which Mr O'Connell disowns, but to which his frenzy may rouse others having less to lose than himself, we will have true technical possession, in the military sense, of Ireland." Such has been the recent policy of the Duke of Wellington: and for this, in so far as it is a violence done to Ireland, or a badge of her subjection, she has to thank Mr O'Connell: for this, in so far as it is a merciful arrangement, diminishing bloodshed by discouraging resistance, she has to thank the British Government. Mr O'Connell it is, that, by making rebellion probable, has forced on this reaction of perfect preparation which, in such a case, became the duty of the Government. The Duke of Wellington it is, that, by using the occasion advantageously for the perfecting of the military organization in Ireland, has made police do the work of war; and by making resistance maniacal, in making it hopeless, has eventually consulted even for the feelings of the rebellious, sparing to them the penalties of insurrection in defeating its earliest symptoms; and for the land itself, has been the chief of benefactors, by removing systematically that inheritance of desolation attached to all civil wars, in cutting away from below the feet of conspirators the very ground on which they could take their earliest stand. Finally, it is Mr O'Connell who has raised an anarchy in many Irish minds, in the minds of all whom he influences, by placing their national feelings in collision with their duty it is the Duke of Wellington who has reconciled the bravest and most erroneous of Irish patriots to his place in a federal system, by taking away all dishonour from submission under circumstances where resistance has at length become notoriously as frantic as would be a war with gravitation.