be that this cruel and wicked crime may be the means of discovering other crimes, and of leading in the end to the detection, if not to the conviction, of persons who have been connected in them, and those who rest in the supposed confidence of impunity may find the spell broken, may find the light of information to reach them, and may find in the end that the law will be able to prevail; because it must be in the experience of many of you that it is unhappily in the power of a few persons who engage in this system of nightly invasion of houses to multiply themselves, apparently by means of terror and intimidation, although at the same time there can be no doubt that, on account of interval of distances, and for many such reasons, there must be many such combinations in this country, acting entirely independent of each other.

’No person can be at a loss to understand the misery and suffering that arises from a state of crime; but perhaps all persons in the community do not equally understand one form of consequence to material prosperity that results from it.  I have before me a document that contains most terribly significant evidence of mischief, alike to all classes of the community, that results from crime and a state of social disturbance.  I have a return of malicious injuries which form the subject of presentment at these Assizes, in number, I understand, exceeding all former precedent.  There are no less than eighty-six presentments, representing all forms of wicked outrage upon property, a tempest—­I might say without exaggeration, a tempest—­of violence and crime that has swept over a considerable portion of this county.  The claims amount to L2700, with the result that the Grand Jury had presented upon a certain part of this county L1250, exercising apparently the greatest care and discrimination in reducing the amount of the claims, and this L1250 was not put upon the whole county, but on certain parts of the county, and the amount at the very least aggravated in a most serious degree the weight of taxation that falls upon the ratepayers of the County Kerry, deepening the difficulties that all classes alike must experience from the depression of the times, and from the other burdens they have to meet in providing against the demands that are made upon them.

’But, of course, you can easily understand that these things do not at all give you any idea of other forms of material injury that arise from crime and disturbance, in the loss of employment and the discouragement of capital, the injury to trade, and the multiplied consequences of all kinds detrimental to the community that arise from insecurity to personal property and life.  And to all those evils we have to add another, and perhaps the worst of all—­that of which you are all conscious, of which experience and observation reaches you every day in all the forms of social life—­a system of unseen terrorism, a system of terror and tyranny that the well-disposed class of the community ought to detest and abhor, and in reference to which, on all sides, I have heard, in this county and other counties, one universal expression of desire—­that some means should be found to put an end to it.