FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN - We are your friends, your sincere friends, desirous to protect and to
serve you. We address you from motives of pure kindness and disinterested affection.
Listen to us because we are your friends - attend to us because we are most desirous to be
of use to you. Weigh well and deliberately what we offer to your consideration. Consider
it carefully. We appeal to your good sense and to your reason; make use of that common
sense which Providence has in its bounty given you in a degree equal, and perhaps superior
to any people on the face of the globe...
We advise you to refrain totally from all secret societies, from all private combinations,
from every species of Whiteboyism or Ribbonism, or by what ever other name any secret or
private association may be called... We most solemnly assure you that secret and illegal
societies - that Ribbonism and Whiteboyism, and violence, and outrage and crime - have
always increased the quantity of misery and oppression in Ireland, and have never produced
any relief or mitigation of the suffering of the people... Fellow-countrymen, we tell you
nothing but the truth. No good, no advantage, no benefit has ever been produced in Ireland
by Whiteboyism or Ribbonism, or any other species of secret association. Such associations
are forbidden by the law of man; and as they are necessarily productive of crimes, they are
more powerfully forbidden by the command of God. By the law of the land, any person who
joins a secret association, bound together by an oath, or any engagement, or promise
whatsoever, is liable to be transported. Any person who joins such a meeting by day is
liable to fine, imprisonment and whipping. Any person who joins them by night is liable
to transportation...
And besides all these punishments by the regular course of the law, there is the
Insurrection Act, which can be applied by the government to any disturbed district, and by
means of that act any person who is out of his dwelling house from sunset to sunrise may be
transported without judge or jury... The police are quite sufficient to put down the
strongest Whiteboy force in anything like a regular attack; and if they were not, the
police are reinforced by the yeomanry corps, and these again by the regular army. The
government has at its command upwards of 100,000 infantry, cavalry and artillery, and if it
wanted foreign aid against domestic disturbances, it could easily procure 100,000 more, so
that all notion of being successful by means of Whiteboyism or secret societies, is as
ridiculous and absurd as it is wicked and criminal. Let it be recollected too, that in all
these disturbances and secret societies, no person of education, character, or property,
takes a part; they are condemned by every honest and every intelligent person; and above
all, they are reprobated by your truly amiable, intelligent, labourious, pious and beloved
clergy...
Fellow-countrymen, attend to our advice; we advise you to abstain from all such secret
combinations. If you engage in them, you not only meet our decided disapprobation in
conjunction with that of your reverend clergy, but you gratify and delight the basest and
bloodiest faction that ever polluted a country, the Orange faction. The Orangemen anxiously
desire that you should form Whiteboy and Ribbon, and other secret societies; they not only
desire it, but they take an active part in promoting the formation of such societies. They
send among you spies and informers, first to instigate you to crime and then to betray you
to punishment. They supply their emissaries with money and they send them to different
parts of the country, holding out to the people the pretense of being friends and
fellow-sufferers. The instances are not few or remote, of such instigators; and it is
quite natural that the Orangemen should adopt such measures, when the country is disturbed;
it is the Orangeman's harvest. He is then employed in the constabulatory force and in the
police and he obtains permanent pay in the yeomanry corps. He shares the rewards with the
informer, and often keeps him to mark out his victim. He is also able to traduce the people
and the religion of the land. The absence of constitutional law enables the Orangeman to
exert the ruffian violence with impunity - and thus, by means of Whiteboy and secret
societies and outrages, the fell Orangeman is able to gratify his predominant passions of
avarice, oppression and cruelty. You could not please the Orangeman more than in embarking
in secret societies, Whiteboyism and outrage. On the other hand, you could not do anything
that could more afflict your sincere friends; you could do nothing that could give greater
grief to the Catholic Association, that now affectionately and anxiously address you. We
are struggling to obtain your rights by constitutional and legal means. We are endeavouring
to obtain redress through the proper and legal channel for the oppressions which aggrieve
you.
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