The ordinary tribunals were powerless to arrest this iniquitous organization of murder and terror, which the Irish disaffectants and their advisers even in that day appear to have brought to a system of execrable perfection. Witnesses and jurors were terrified into silence. In one case the master of a female servant was commanded to dismiss her because her _mother_ had given evidence against a person brought to trial for a capital crime, and similar cases were of almost daily occurrence. Five armed men went to the house of Patrick Lalor, a man of nearly seventy years of age, and shot him through the body. His crime had been disobedience to a mandate to give up some ground which he held contrary to the will of the Terrorists. The same system prevented a son of Lalor, and an eye-witness of his murder, from giving evidence against his murderers. On the trial of these miscreants at Kilkenny assizes, the jury not being able to agree was dismissed. It had been arranged in the jury-room that nothing should transpire as to the opinions of individual jurymen, and yet, in _half an hour_, the names of those in favour of an acquittal or of a conviction were printed--the former in black, and the latter, or as they were designated the "jurors who were for blood," in red ink. The result was that those whose names were printed in red were obliged to leave the country. At the Clonmel assizes the previous October (1832), when a person was to be tried for resisting the payment of tithe, only 76 jurors out of 265 who had been summoned made their appearance. A gentleman had been murdered in sight of his own gate in consequence of some dispute in connection with tithes. The answer of his son-in-law, summoned by the coroner to give evidence against the supposed murderer, was this: "That he would submit to any penalty the crown or the law would impose upon him, but he would not appear at the trial, because he knew that if he stood forward as a witness his life would inevitably be forfeited." The Irish Government received a notice from Kilkenny "that many gentlemen who had always" most conscientiously discharged their duties, "would not attend at the next assizes. They cared not what penalty was imposed upon them. They refused to attend, because they knew that death" awaited them if they dared to do their duty. "It is the boast of the prisoners," continued this document, "that they cannot under existing circumstances be found guilty." Under such a disgraceful state of things, outrage had become of course triumphant. The sickening catalogue of Irish cruelty and crime during the previous year comprised 172 homicides, 465 robberies, 568 burglaries, 455 _acts of houghing of cattle_, 2,095 illegal notices, 425 illegal meetings, 796 _malicious injuries to property_, 753 _attacks on houses_, 280 arsons, 3,156 serious assaults, making an aggregate of crimes of every description during the year, connected with the disturbed state of the country, exceeding 9,000 in number, and the number was evidently still on the increase.