and a slave; the nation seemed in humble expectation of some happy redemption - this was the time—your representatives are responsible to you for a great opportunity; never was a Parliament so favoured by the conjuncture, or so backed by the people.

As soon as trade was opened, the Irish nation, conceiving that her associations and charter would be a reproach, if, notwithstanding both, she consented to be governed by laws .which she did not make; conceiving also, that nothing in justice or policy, in the real or the apparent interest of Great Britain, stood in the way of liberty; denied, in her different counties and cities, the supremacy of the British Parliament; and having herself asserted liberty, instructed her representatives to give to that assertion the solemnity of a law, or the countenance of a resolution. You saw the policy of declaring your sentiments, that England might see the danger of invading, your own Parliament the safety of asserting, and all, the prudence of allowing rights of which an armed and chartered nation proclaimed herself tenacious. You proceeded in this great business like a serious animated nation, who entertained a deep sense of her privileges, and a calm determination to maintain them. It was not the measure of a faction, it was not the act of a party, but of a people, rising up like one man to claim their freedom; a whole people, long depressed, and cruelly derided, flocking together with the most perfect order, and each individual, man by man, from his own lips preferring his right to be free! That people! the Irish nation, whose grossness, tameness, and disorder, had been a subject of ribaldry to themselves, to those very men of our own country, to whose inconstant, mean, frivolous, and venal political habits, you now gave the soundest lessons of constitution, and the brightest example of order: neither was this great act confined to one persuasion, but Protestant and Papist, their ancient animosity in such a cause subsiding, signed the same declaration of right; and those whom neither time, nor severity, nor lenity, nor the penal code, nor its relaxation, had been able to unite, in freedom found a rapid reconciliation; a certain flame rectified the humours of superstition. The time had arrived when the spirit of truth and liberty should descend upon the man of the Romish persuasion, and touch his Catholic lips with public fire. He was tried and was found faithful; he was weighed in the balance and proved sufficient: we have learned at last a simple, but great truth, that one man is like another, and that all men wish to be free. I have been told the Roman Catholic had no right to sign instruc tions. I do not inquire into the right; I am satisfied with

the fact; for the Catholic, taking a constitutional test, qualifies, and is, in conscience and equity, constituted a brother and fellow-citizen. In short, such were your measures and declarations, that I defy the most learned of your traducers, from all the store of their reading, to produce any thing comparable to the conduct of the Irish nation. And I will further say, that if it had not been you who had spoken, but the laws you were employed to restore; if the law had put forth a voice and promulgated herself, she had not been revealed in accents of more truth, temper, and purity. You shook off the tyranny of the English; you deterred the invasion of the French; you restored the liberties of the Irish; you gave operation to law; you gave civilization to manners; you raised a drooping province; you humbled a saucy ministry; you compassed a mighty revolution; you became a theme of public worship, and the subject of just and necessary thanksgiving; they who abhor, revered you; nations you never heard of, spoke of you; nothing was wanting but the uniform concurrence of your Parliament, to have placed the Irish nation on the broad foundation of liberty, and the summit of fame.

In your great effort you met, however, with difficulties; not from the English nation, but the Irish administration, who had engaged to the British minister, that Ireland, indulged in her requisition for trade, should not bethink herself of constitutional reformation; and accordingly, personal application was made to many, hoping that they would oppose the discussion of all political questions in Parliament; and also, wherever they had property, credit, or character, would prevent the people from expressing their sentiments. The representations of our minister were to receive the colour of truth, by concealing the temper and state of the nation. In this application the Irish minister found accomplices; by such the blessings of the British constitution were represented as a speculative good, and the loss of these blessings as a speculative evil. Attempts were made to debase and poison the public mind, by deterring it from questions which related to liberty as above comprehension and incompatible with industry. Resolutions expressive of our entire satisfaction in the recent extent of trade, were proposed in the Commons, with a dark design to dissolve the nation's spirit, and prevent the recovery of her constitution, that so this country might sit down a commercial province, and not seize the opportunity of becoming a free kingdom: nor did such men endeavour to mislead your understanding only, they defamed your cha

racter.

The great and glorious effort which I have just related, to

shake off the yoke of the British Parliament, was vilified as an attempt to sever from the British nation, as if the connection was preserved by the circumstance which disgraced it, or the two nations were linked together like lord and vassal, and not united by common privilege as fellow-subjects and fellow-freemen. They, whose friends had been neglected, or whose corrupt and written proposals had been refused, and who, under that disgust, had opposed Lord Buckingham on the subject of commerce, now, having made up matters with the court, opposed the people on the subject of liberty. They who had been accustomed to make private advantage of public injuries, and who had supported their retainers on their suffrages, blessed indeed with ample property, but, by a servile following, made dependent upon government, opposed the return of your liberty, as they had, until hurried away in the tide of 1779, opposed the extension of your trade. They charged your struggle for liberty as a design against property, a conspiracy to rob the great by a pillaging commonalty; they made this charge with the style and air of authority, as if property entitled the proprietor not only to sell himself, but to sell and load the public with his comrades and sycophants, and added consequence and consecration to such infamous traffic. They who hated the people from whom they had just proceeded : they who had little principle and no property, except your spoil; they who fear lest this kingdom should become too considerable to be bought aud sold; all those who flourish in a province, and would sink in a nation; that inferior species of plausible character, actuated by little objects and a weak intellect, formed to shine in a court, but shrivel in a free country, fell into the same idle, insolent, conceited way of talking. On the other hand, they who wished to restore the rights of this kingdom, were represented as seditious men, friends to anarchy, enemies to the British nation and their own; though they had no personal views, no friend, no following, no mortification, no expectation, no object for these nations, but to free one, and endear both; in a word, the whole nation was traduced in a foolish, wanton, and wicked address, concerted to stop her growth, and to fix her political distempers, but attended with the immediate effect of rousing her virtue. You persisted; and, though these obstructions held you out to England as a divided people, and lost you the terror of your name; lost you the declaratory resolution; lost you the repeal of the law of Poynings; entailed upon you the lesser duty on sugar, and the perpetual mutiny bill; yet, in a great degree, you prevailed. But, if some men of property, (I say, some, for the weight of property beyond comparison, was on your side,) had acted as they ought; if some of them had

not gone the last length against their country upon every question; if some had been steady on any question; if some of them had taken as much pains to establish the British constitution as they did take to promote or translate their creatures; or if they had not taken pains to keep the nation down, the session had been perfect; yet, in a great degree, you prevailed; and, having universally denied the supremacy of the British Parliament, and, by your act and energy, supported by the individual declarations of your representatives, put an end to the British law of mutiny and desertion in Ireland, you made it necessary for the crown to apply to the Irish Parliament for a law to regulate the army; you revived to your own Parliament its inherent and dormant authority, its sole and exclusive right to regulate His Majesty's forces in Ireland; you gave the power into the hands of your representatives, and they surrendered it for ever to the crown. I lament this act, not only on account of the constitution which we have endangered, of the power and opportunity which we have lost, but of the example which we have left; for the noblest struggle ever made by a people to shake off tyranny, has been, in this instance, converted into a change of tyrants, and the British minister put in the place of the British Parliament. A government, approaching to a military one, has been imposed upon us by our own law; our virtue has been turned against ourselves, and punished by our own Parliament; a public and concluding disgrace has been thrown upon our past efforts, and a melancholy damp cast on our future.

There is a certain national character, there is a dignity, without which no people can look for respect or privilege; a nation's character is her shield; the people's majesty a sacred defence; public pride a mighty protection. It is therefore I not only feel the constitution stabbed by this perpetual mutiny bill, but see with concern other great and solid securities trampled upon; the maxims of public pride, of parliamentary consistency, and national dignity, violated; a Parliament, the most respectable that ever sat in this country, made to adopt the dictates of the British council, and forego its own recorded opinions, suffering the British minister to mould our constitution, as the British manufacturers have been suffered to regulate our commerce; the nation itself involved and scandalized in the compliance of her legislature, and exhibited to Great Britain as a vain boaster; a certain ridicule cast upon her declarations, exertions, and arms; and the British minister taught by ourselves to repent of past concessions, and encouraged for the future to make a bold and unconstitutional stand against the just desires and obvious rights of the Irish nation.

I have heard it urged as an excuse for this pernicious and disgraceful measure, that it was a matter of necessity. A mutiny bill was necessary: you made it necessary; but the necessity lay on the king, not on his people. You did not want an army to defend your lives and properties; you did not want an army to support your claims; you did not want an army to give protection and confidence to your servants; you were yourselves an army adequate to all your own purposes; your safety reposed with your liberty, where both ought ever to reside, in the nation's right hand. It was His Majesty, whose power, influence, servants, pride, attachment, all were in that great question involved. You had the key to the royal heart; the instrument of power was in your hand; the Crown was a suppliant to the Irish nation, not for revenue, but for what princes value more, the army; and must have taken it, as the King takes his revenue, and took his crown, upon the terms which his subjects, in their wisdom, were pleased to ordain; and had your Parliament chosen to have annexed the great charter which they who formed the bill, knowing the House, prudently declined; but had your Parliament chosen to have annexed the great charter to the mutiny bill, the British minister must have finally complied; his own bayonet would have forced Magna Charta upon him, and standing armies, in general hostile to liberty, might have been rendered the involuntary and miraculous instrument of its establishment. Never did a nation stand so entrenched; never was a post of strength so lost! Do not believe that vulgar threat, that the king would have disbanded his army; arguments of this kind are not to be listened to, nor are those in earnest who resort to them; nor should the ministers of kings be suffered to tell the subjects of this country that His Majesty will not permit his Irish Parliament, like that of Great Britain, from time to time, to regulate its own military establishment; or, that His Majesty will not receive great and unconstitutional powers, such as a limited mutiny bill communicates, except upon terms more extraordinary and more unconstitutional: as well might the minister ask for absolute power, and denounce, on the hesita tion of Parliament, an abdication of the crown. But this argument was not founded on the firmness of the minister by whom it was invented, but in the folly or the corruption of those to whom it was applied. The mutiny bill was not made perpetual because the British minister would not take a limited, but because the Irish Parliament was known to be ready to give him a perpetual, dominion over the army; the minister would have been satisfied with a good bill, but preferred a bad one; the attack on your liberty had never been made, if the