thousand) commit disorders. Well! punish them as you do, and as you ought to punish them, for their violence against the just property of each individual clergyman, as each individual suffers. Support the injured rector, or the injured impropriator, in the enjoyment of the estate, of which (whether on the best plan or not) the laws have put him in possession. Let the crime and the punishment stand upon their own bottom. But now we ought all of us, clergymen most particularly, to avoid assigning another cause of quarrel, in order to infuse a new source of bitterness into a dispute, which personal feelings on both sides will of themselves make bitter enough, and thereby involve in it by religious descriptions men, who have individually no share whatsoever in those irregular acts. Let us not make the malignant fictions of our own imaginations, heated with factious controversies, reasons for keeping men, that are neither guilty, nor justly suspected of crime, in a servitude equally dishonourable and unsafe to religion, and to the state. When men are constantly accused, but know themselves not to be guilty, they must naturally abhor their accusers. There is no character, when malignantly taken up and deliberately pursued, which more naturally excites indignation and abhorrence in mankind; especially in that part of mankind which suffers from it. I do not pretend to take pride in an extravagant attachment to any sect. Some gentlemen in Ireland affect that sort of glory. It is to their taste. Their piety, I take it for granted, justifies the fervour of their zeal, and may palliate the excess of it. Being myself no more than a common layman, commonly informed in controversies, leading only a very common life, and having only a common citizen's interest in the church, or in the state, yet to you I will say, in justice to my own sentiments, that not one of those zealots for a protestant interest wishes more sincerely than I do, perhaps not half so sincerely, for the support of the established church in both these kingdoms. It is a great link towards holding fast the connexion of religion with the state; and for keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of constitution, in a close connexion of opinion and affection. I wish it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary land proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of church and state, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be warmly connected. I wish it well, because it is more closely combined than any other of the church systems with the Crown, which is the stay of the mixed constitution; because it is, as things now stand, the sole connecting political principle between the constitutions of the two independent kingdoms. I have another, and infinitely a stronger, reason for wishing it well; it is, that in the present time I consider it as one of the main pillars of the christian religion itself. The body and substance of every religion I regard much more than any of the forms and dogmas of the particular sects. Its fall would leave a great void, which nothing else, of which I can form any distinct idea, might fill. I respect the catholick hierarchy, and the presbyterian republick. But I know, that the hope or the fear of establishing either of them is, in these kingdoms, equally chimerical, even if I preferred one or the other of them to the establishment, which certainly I do not. These are some of my reasons for wishing the support of the church of Ireland as by law established. These reasons are founded as well on the absolute as on the relative situation of that kingdom. But it is because I love the church, and the king, and the privileges of parliament, that I am to be ready for any violence, or any injustice, or anv absurdity, in the means of supporting any of these powers, or all of them together? Instead of prating about protestant ascendencies, protestant parliaments ought, in my opinion, to think at last of becoming patriot parliaments. The legislature of Ireland, like all legislatures, ought to frame its laws to suit the people and the circumstances of the country, and not any longer to make it their whole business to force the nature, the temper, and the inveterate habits of a nation to a conformity to speculative systems concerning any kind of laws. Ireland has an established government, and a religion legally established, which are to be preserved. It has a people, who are to be preserved too, and to be led by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that government. Ireland is a country under peculiar circumstances. The people of Ireland are a very mixed people; and the quantities of the several ingredients in the mixture are very much disproportioned to each other.. Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of benevolent legislation or are we not rather to provide for the several parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the heterogeneous nature of the mass? Would not common reason and common honesty dictate to us the policy of regulating the people in the several descriptions, of which they are composed, according to the natural ranks and classes of an orderly civil society, under a common protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favourable at once to authority and to freedom; such as the British constitution boasts to be, and such as it is, to those who enjoy it? You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which consequently does not answer to them any one purpose of a religious establishment. This is a state of things, which no man in his senses can call perfectly happy. But it is the state of Ireland. Two hundred years of experiment shew it to be unalterable. Many a fierce struggle has passed between the parties. The result is—you cannot make the people protestants and they cannot shake off a protestant government. This is what experience teaches, and what all men of sense, of all descriptions, know. To-day the question is this-are we to make the best of this situation, which we cannot alter? The question is-shall the condition of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burthens of two religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation; or shall it be aggravated by stripping the people thus loaded, of every thing, which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as to leave them naked of every sort of right, and of every name of franchise; to outlaw them from the constitution, and to cut off (perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to property, or any other qualification, from all connexion with the popular representation of the kingdom? ants have a share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and disinterested, as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful protestant subjects :-that they will be or are to be left without house or land, to the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation, with which they are threatened :—that therefore they cannot so much as listen to any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional policy; the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door. See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of a sufficiently long perspective! This is indeed to speak plain, though to speak nothing very new. The same thing has been said in all times and in all languages. The language of tyranny has been invariable; the general good is inconsistent with my personal safety. Justice and liberty seem so alarming to these gentlemen, that they are not ashamed even to slander their own titles; to calumniate, and call in doubt, their right to their own estates, and to consider themselves as novel disseizors, usurpers, and intruders, rather than lose a pretext for becoming oppressors of their fellow-citizens, whom they (not I) choose to describe themselves as having robbed. As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding. Liberty is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion; but a zeal for religion is pretended and assumed, to destroy liberty. The catholick religion is completely free. It has no establishIt has no establishment; but it is recognised, permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws. If a man is satisfied to be a slave, he may be a papist with perfect impunity. He may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as an outlaw from the British constitution. If the constitutional liberty of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course would be taken. The franchise would have been permitted, and the mass exterminated. But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it hypocritically pretend-modes, by which lordships and demeans have been ed, is to make a trap to catch his liberty. Instead of putting themselves in this odious point of light, one would think they would wish to let Time draw his oblivious veil over the unpleasant acquired in theirs, and almost in all other countries upon earth. It might be imagined, that, when the sufferer (if a sufferer exists) had forgot the wrong, they would be pleased to forget it too; that they would permit the sacred name of possession to stand in the place of the melancholy and unpleasant title of grantees of confiscation; which, though firm and valid in law, surely merits the name, that a great Roman jurist gave to a title at least as valid in his nation, as confiscation would be either in his or in ours :-Tristis et luctuosa successio. So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times. Trusting wholly in their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext of the general good of the community. They say, that if the people, under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their property. They tell us, that they Such is the situation of every man, who comes act only on the defensive. They inform the pub-in upon the ruin of another-his succeeding, unlick of Europe, that their estates are made up of der this circumstance, is tristis et luctuosa succesforfeitures and confiscations from the natives :- sio. If it had been the fate of any gentleman to that, if the body of people obtain votes, any num-profit by the confiscation of his neighbour, one ber of votes, however small, it will be a step to would think he would be more disposed to give the choice of members of their own religion:- him a valuable interest under him in his land; or that the house of commons, in spite of the influ- to allow him a pension, as I understand one worence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed in- thy person has done, without fear or apprehension, terest now in their hands, will be composed in the that his benevolence to a ruined family would be whole, or in far the major part, of papists; that construed into a recognition of the forfeited title. this popish house of commons will instantly pass The publick of England the other day acted in a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will this manner towards Lord Newburgh, a catholick. not be in their power to save even by entering into Though the estate had been vested by law in the that popish party themselves, because there are greatest of the publick charities, they have given prior claimants to be satisfied;-that as to the him a pension from his confiscation. They have house of lords, though neither papists nor protest-gone further in other cascs. On the last rebellion in 1745, in Scotland, several forfeitures were incurred. They had been disposed of by parliament to certain laudable uses. Parliament reversed the method, which they had adopted in Lord Newburgh's case, and in my opinion did better; they gave the forfeited estates to the successours of the forfeiting proprietors, chargeable in part with the uses. Is this, or any thing like this, asked in favour of any human creature in Ireland? It is bounty; it is charity; wise bounty and politick charity; but no man can claim it as a right. Here no such thing is claimed as right, or begged as charity. The demand has an object as distant from all considerations of this sort, as any two extremes can be. The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna Charta, to the freehold, which they have by descent, or obtain as the fruits of their industry. They call for no man's estate; they desire not to be dispossessed of their own. But this melancholy and invidious title is a favourite (and like favourites, always of the least inerit) with those, who possess every other title upon earth along with it. For this purpose, they revive the bitter memory of every dissension, which has torn to pieces their miserable country for ages. After what has passed in 1782, one would not think, that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible, confiscatory, and exterminatory periods. They would not set men upon calling from the quiet sleep of death any Samuel, to ask him, by what act of arbitrary monarchs, by what inquisitions of corrupted tribunals, and tortured jurors, by what fictitious tenures, invented to dispossess whole unoffending tribes and their chieftains! They would not conjure up the ghosts from the ruins of castles and churches, to tell for what attempt to struggle for the independence of an Irish legislature, and to raise armies of volunteers, without regular commissions from the Crown, in support of that independence, the estates of the old Irish nobility and gentry had been confiscated. They would not wantonly call on those phantoms, to tell by what English acts of parliament, forced upon two reluctant kings, the lands of their country were put up to a mean and scandalous auction in every goldsmith's shop in London; or chopped to pieces, and cut into rations, to pay the mercenary soldiery of a regicide usurper. They would not be so fond of titles under Cromwell, who, if he avenged an Irish rebellion against the sovereign authority of the parliament of England, had himself rebelled against the very parliament, whose sovereignty he asserted, full as much as the Irish nation, which he was sent to subdue and confiscate, could rebel against that parliament, or could rebel against the king, against whom both he and the parliament, which he served, and which he betrayed, had both of them rebelled. The gentlemen, who hold the language of the day, know perfectly well, that the Irish in 1641 pretended at least, that they did not rise against the king, nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put upon their act. But full surely they rebelled against the authority of the parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do. Admitting (I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in those of their children and their grandchildren even to the fifth and sixth generations. Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural rebellion in favour of the independence of Ireland, will it follow, that it must be avenged for ever? Will it follow, that it must be avenged on thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of those, whom they can never trace, by the labours of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion against the parliament of England? If, however, you could find out these pedigrees of guilt, I do not think the difference would be essential. History records many things, which ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor policy, can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day; when we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations, which formerly inflamed the furious factions, which had torn their country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and abominable things, which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured, robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years after, to find some colour for justifying them in the eternal proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people. Let us come to a later period of those confiscations, with the memory of which the gentlemen, who triumph in the acts of 1782, are so much delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English parliament in 1688, and the English parliament again put up to sale the greatest part of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this rebellion; nor to blame the English parliament for this confiscation. The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their feeble power. the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated sovereign against a prince, whom the parliaments of Ireland and Scotland had recognised, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them. In generous minds, some small degree of compassion might be excited for an errour, where they were misled, as Cicero Be says to a conqueror, quádam specie et similitudine | power, might one not ask these gentlemen, whether pacis, not without a mistaken appearance of duty, and for which the guilty have suffered by exile abroad, and slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best calculators compute, that Ireland lost 200,000 of her inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle, that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish catholicks must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a prince, whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their religion, or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect; and who, far from trespassing on their liberties and properties, secured both them and the independence of their country in much the same manner, that we have seen the same things done at the period of 1782-I trust the last revolution in Ireland. That the Irish parliament of King James did in some particulars, though feebly, imitate the rigour, which had been used towards the Irish, is true enough. Blamable enough they were for what they had done, though under the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or counter-confiscations as long as I live. When they happen by necessity, I shall think the necessity lamentable and odious: I shall think, that any thing done under it ought not to pass into precedent, or to be adopted by choice, or to produce any of those shocking retaliations, which never suffer dissensions to subside. Least of all would I fix the transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodizing it in tyrannick government. If it were permitted to argue with it would not be more natural, instead of wantonly * LETTER ON THE AFFAIRS OF IRELAND. WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1797. DEAR SIR, In the reduced state of body, and in the dejected state of mind, in which I find myself at this very advanced period of my life, it is a great consolation to me to know, that a cause I ever had so very near my heart is taken up by a man of your activity and talents. It is very true, that your late friend, my ever dear and honoured son, was in the highest degree solicitous about the final event of a business, which he also had pursued for a long time with infinite zeal, and no small degree of success. It was not above half an hour before he left me for ever, that he spoke with considerable earnestness on this very subject. If I had needed any incentives to do my best for freeing the body of my country from the grievances under which they labour, this alone would certainly call forth all my endea vours. The person, who succeeded to the government of Ireland about the time of that afflicting event, had been all along of my sentiments and yours upon this subject and far from needing to be stimulated by me, that incomparable person, and those in whom he strictly confided, even went before me in their resolution to pursue the great end of government, the satisfaction and concord of the people, with whose welfare they were charged. I cannot bear to think on the causes, by which this great plan of policy, so manifestly beneficial to both kingdoms, has been defeated. Your mistake with regard to me lies in supposing, that I did not, when his removal was in agitation, strongly and personally represent to several of his Majesty's ministers, to whom I could have the most ready access, the true state of Ireland, and the mischiefs, which sooner or later must arise from subjecting the mass of the people to the capricious and interested domination of an exceeding small faction and its dependencies. | could not have expected any thing, as you seem to do, from my active exertions. I could do nothing, if I was still stronger, not even " Si meus adforet Hector." There is no hope for the body of the people of Ireland, as long as those, who are in power with you, shall make it the great object of their policy to propagate an opinion on this side of the water, that the mass of their countrymen are not to be trusted by their government: and that the only hold, which England has upon Ireland, consists in preserving a certain very small number of gentlemen in full possession of a monopoly of that kingdom. This system has disgusted many others. besides catholicks and dissenters. That representation was made the last time, or As to those, who on your side are in the oppovery nearly the last time, that I have ever had the sition to government, they are composed of perhonour of seeing those ministers. I am so far sons, several of whom I love and revere. They from having any credit with them on this, or any have been irritated by a treatment too much for other publick matters, that I have reason to be the ordinary patience of mankind to bear, into the certain, if it were known, that any person in office adoption of schemes, which, however argumentain Ireland, from the highest to the lowest, were tively specious, would go practically to the ininfluenced by my opinions, and disposed to act evitable ruin of the kingdom. The opposition upon them, such an one would be instantly turned always connects the emancipation of the cathoout of his employment. You have formed to my licks with these schemes of reformation: indeed it person a flattering, yet in truth a very erroneous, makes the former only a member of the latter opinion of my power with those, who direct the project. The gentlemen, who enforce that oppopublick measures. I never have been directly or sition, are, in my opinion, playing the game of indirectly consulted about any thing that is done. their adversaries with all their might; and there The judgment of the eminent and able persons, is no third party in Ireland (nor in England who conduct publick affairs, is undoubtedly supe- neither) to separate things, that are in themselves riour to mine but self-partiality induces almost so distinct, I mean the admitting people to the every man to defer something to his own. No- benefits of the constitution, and the change in the thing is more notorious, than that I have the mis- form of the constitution itself. fortune of thinking, that no one capital measure relative to political arrangements, and still less that a new military plan for the defence of either kingdom in this arduous war, has been taken upon any other principle, than such as must conduct us to inevitable ruin. In the state of my mind, so discordant with the tone of ministers, and still more discordant with the tone of opposition, you may judge what degree of weight I am likely to have with either of the parties who divide this kingdom; even though I were endowed with strength of body, or were possessed of any active situation in the government, which might give success to my endeavours. But the fact is, since the day of my unspeakable calamity, except in the attentions of a very few old and con.passionate friends, I am totally out of all social intercourse. My health has gone down very rapidly; and I have been brought hither with very faint hopes of life, and enfeebled to such a degree, as those, who had known me some time ago, could scarcely think credible. Since I came hither, my sufferings have been greatly aggravated, and my little strength still further reduced; so that, though I am told the symptoms of my disorder begin to carry a more favourable aspect, I pass the far larger part of the twenty-four hours, indeed almost the whole, either in my bed, or lying upon the couch, from which I dictate this. Had you been apprized of this circumstance, you As every one knows, that a great part of the constitution of the Irish house of commons was formed about the year 1614, expressly for bringing that house into a state of dependence; and that the new representative was at that time seated and installed by force and violence; nothing can be more impolitick than for those, who wish the house to stand on its present basis, (as for one, I most sincerely do,) to make it appear to have kept too much the principle of its first institution, and to continue to be as little a virtual, as it is an actual, representative of the commons. It is the degeneracy of such an institution, so vicious in its principle, that is to be wished for. If men have the real benefit of a sympathetick representation, none but those, who are heated and intoxicated with theory, will look for any other. This sort of representation, my dear Sir, must wholly depend, not on the force with which it is upheld, but upon the prudence of those who have influence upon it. Indeed, without some such prudence in the use of authority, I do not know, at least in the present time, how any power can long continue. If it be true, that both parties are carrying things to extremities in different ways, the object, which you and I have in common, that is to say, the union and concord of our country, on the basis of the actual representation, without risking those evils, which any change in the form of our legislature must inevitably bring on, can never be ob |