In the meantime, I trust the reader will have an opportunity of perceiving that I have not in the _Tithe-Proctor_, any more than in my other work, forgotten to show him that even in the most startling phases of Irish crime and tumult, I have by no means neglected to draw the warm, generous, and natural virtues of my countrymen, and to satisfy him that a very few guilty wretches are quite sufficient, however unjustly, to blacken and degrade a large district.
There is, however, a certain class of pseudo-patriots in this country, who are of opinion that every writer, professing to depict our national character and manners, should make it a point of conscience to suppress all that is calculated "to lessen us in the eyes of the world," as they are pleased to term it, and only to give to the public the bright and favorable side.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the moral dishonesty and meanness of a principle, at once so disgraceful to literature and so repugnant to truth.

These thin-skinned gentlemen are of opinion that the crime itself is a matter of trivial importance compared to the fact of its becoming known, and that provided the outside of the platter is kept clean, it matters not how filthy it may be within.
In the days of my boyhood and early life, the people of Ireland were, generally speaking, an honest, candid, faithful, and grateful people, who loved truth, and felt the practical influence of religious feeling strongly, but so dishonest and degrading has been the long curse of agitation, to which forms of it their moral and social principles have been exposed, that there probably could not be found in any country, an instance in which the virtues of the whole people have been so completely debauched and contaminated (I do not say voluntarily), as those of the Irish have been by the leading advocates of repeal.

The degeneracy of character, occasioned by those tampering with our national virtues, is such as we shall not recover from these thirty years to come.

Many of our best, mellow-toned, old virtues, that pass in an unbroken link of hereditary beauty from father to son, and from family to family, like some sacred and inestimable heirloom, at once reverenced and loved, are all gone--such as our love of truth, our simple devotion and patriarchal piety, our sincerity in all social intercourse, and others of the same stamp; whilst little else is left us but a barren catalogue of broken and dishonest promises, and the consciousness of having been at once fleeced and laughed at.