rior to your own? On the other hand, will you not punish them? Will you leave your liberties to be trampled on by those men? Will you bring them and yourselves, all constituted orders, executive power, judicial power, parliamentary authority, into a state of odium, impotence, and contempt, transferring the task of defending publie right into the hands of the populace, and leaving it to the judges to break the laws, and to the people to assert them? Such would be the consequence of false moderation, of irritating timidity, of inflammatory palliations, of the weak and corrupt hope of compromising with the court, before you have emancipated the country.

I have answered the only semblance of a solid reason against the motion. I will now try to remove some lesser pretences, some minor impediments; for instance; 1st, that we have a resolution of the same kind already in our Journals. But how often was the Great Charter confirmed? not more frequently than your rights have been violated. Is one solitary resolution, declaratory of your rights, sufficient for a country, whose history, from the beginning unto the end, has been a course of violation?

The fact is, every new breach is a reason for a new repair; every new infringement should be a new declaration, lest charters should be overwhelmed by precedents, and a nation's rights lost in oblivion, and the people. themselves lose the memory of their own freedom.

I shall hear of ingratitude, and name the argu

ment to despise it. I know the men who use it are not grateful; they are insatiate, they are public ex. tortioners, who would stop the tide of public prosperity, and turn it to the channel of their own wretched emolument. I know of no species of gratitude which should prevent my country from being free; no gratitude which should oblige Ireland to be the slave of England. In cases of robbery of usurpation, nothing is an object of gratitude, except the thing stolen, the charter spoliated. A nation's liberty cannot, like her money, be rated and parcelled out in gratitude. No man can be grateful or liberal of his conscience, nor woman of her honour, nor nation of her liberty. There are certain inimpartable, inherent, invaluable properties, not to be alienated from the person, whether body politic or body natural. With the same contempt do I treat that charge, which says, that Ireland is insatiable; seeing, that Ireland asks nothing but that which Great Britain has robbed her of her rights and privileges. To say, that Ireland is not to be satisfied with liberty, because she is not satisfied with slavery, is folly.

1

I laugh at that man who supposes, that Ireland will not be content with a free trade, and a free constitution; and would any man advise her to be content with less?

I shall be told, that we hazard the modification of the law of Poinings, and the Judges Bill, and the

Habeas Corpus. Bill, and the Nullum Tempus Bill; but I ask, have you been for years begging for these little things, and have not you yet been able to obtain them? and have you been contending against a little body of eighty men, in Privy Council assembled, convocating themselves into the image of a Parliament, and ministering your high office; and have

you been contending against one man, a humble individual, to you a Leviathan, the English Attorney General, exercising Irish legislation in his own person, and making your parliamentary deliberations a' blank, by altering your bills, or suppressing them; have you not been able to quell this little monster? Do you wish to know the reason? I will tell you,-because you have not been a parliament, nor your country a people. Do you wish to know the remedy?-be a parliament, become a nation, and those things will follow in the train of your consequence.

I shall be told that tithes are shaken, being vested by force of English acts; but in answer to that, I observe, time may be a title, but an English Act of Parliament certainly cannot it is an authority which, if a judge would charge, no jury would find, and which all the Electors of Ireland have already disclaimed,-disclaimed unequivocally, cordially, and universally.

Sir, this is good argument for an act of title, but no argument against a declaration of right. My

friend who sits above me, has a bill of confirmation. We do not come unprepared to parliament. I am not come to shake property, but to confirm property, and to restore freedom. The nation begins to form→ we are moulding into a people,-freedom assertedproperty secured-and the army, a mercenary band, likely to be dependent on your Parliament, restrained by law. Never was such a revolution accomplished in so short a time, and with such pub. lic tranquillity. In what situation would those men who call themselves friends of Constitution and of Government have left you? They would have left you without a title (as they stole it) to your estates, without an assertion of your constitution, or a law for your army; and this state of private and public insecurity, this anarchy raging in the kingdom for eighteen months, these mock-moderators would have had the presumption to call peace.

The King has no other title to his Crown than that which you have to your Liberty; both are founded, the throne and your freedom, upon the right vested in the subject, to resist by arms, notwithstanding their oaths of allegiance, any authority attempting to impose acts of power as laws: whether that authority be one man or a host, the second James or the British Parliament, every argument for the House of Hanover is equally an argument for the liberties of Ireland. The Act of

Settlement is an act of rebellion, or the 6th George First an act of usurpation. I do not refer to doubtful history but to living record, to common Charters, to the interpretation England has put on those Charters, an interpretation made, not by words only, but crowned by arms; to the Revolution she has formed upon them, to the King she has established, and above all, to the oath of allegiance solemnly plighted to the House of Stuart and afterwards set aside in the instance of a grave and moral people absolved by virtue of those very Charters; and as any thing less than liberty is inadequate to Ireland, so is it dangerous to Great Britain. We are too near the British nation we are too conversant with her historywe are too much fired by her example, to be any thing less than equals; any thing less, we should be her bitterest enemies. An enemy to that power which smote us with her mace, and to that constitution from whose blessings we were excluded-to be ground as we have been by the British nation, bound by her Parliament, plundered by her Crown, threatened by her enemies, and insulted with her protection, while we returned thanks for her condescension, is a system of meanness and misery which has expired in our determination, and in her magnanimity; that there are precedents against us I allow

acts of power I would call them, not precedents; and I answer the English pleading such precedents,