ought to be? Do you hesitate for an answer? If you do, let me remind you that, until the last year, three millions of your countrymen have, by the express letter of the law, been excluded from the reality of actual, and even from the phantom of virtual representation. Shall we, then, be told that this is only the affirmation of a wicked and seditious incendiary? If you do not feel the mockery of such a charge, look at your country; in what state do you find it? Is it in a state of tranquillity and general satisfaction? These are traces by which good are ever to be distinguished from bad governments, without any very minute inquiry or speculative refinement. Do you feel that a veneration for the law, a pious and humble attachment to the constitution, form the political morality of the people? Do you find that comfort and competency among your people which are always to be found where a government is mild and moderate, where taxes are imposed by a body who have an interest in treating the poorer orders with compassion, and preventing the weight of taxation from pressing sore up on them?

Gentlemen, I mean not to impeach the state of your representation; I am not saying that it is defective, or that it ought to be altered or amended; nor is this a place for me to say whether I think that three millions of the inhabitants of a country, whose whole number is but four, ought to be admitted to any efficient situation in the state. It may be said, and truly, that these are not questions for either of us directly to decide; but you cannot refuse them some passing consideration, at least when you remember that on this subject the real question for your decision is, whether the allegation of a defect in your constitution is so utterly unfounded and false, that you can ascribe it only to the malice and perverseness of a wicked mind, and not to the innocent mistake of an ordinary understanding; whether it may not be mistake; whether it can be only sedition? And here, gentlemen, I own I cannot but regret that one of our countrymen should be criminally pursued for asserting the necessity of a reform, at the very moment when that necessity seems admitted by the Parliament itself; that this unhappy reform shall, at the same moment, be a subject of legislative discussion and criminal prosecution. Far am I from imputing any sinister design to the virtue or wisdom of our Government; but who can avoid feeling the deplorable impression that must be made on the public mind when the demand for that reform is answered by a criminal information! I am the more forcibly impressed by this consideration, when I consider that when this information was first put on the file, the subject was transiently mentioned in the House of Commons. Some circumstance retarded the progress of the inquiry there,

and the progress of the information was equally retarded here. On the first day of the session you all know that subject was again brought forward in the House of Commons, and, as if they had slept together, this prosecution was also revived in the Court of King's Bench, and that before a jury taken from a panel partly composed of those very Members of Parliament who, in the House of Commons, must debate upon this subject as a measure of public advantage, which they are here called upon to consider as a public crime.*

In

This paper, gentlemen, insists upon the necessity of emancipating the Catholics of Ireland, and that is charged as a part of the libel. If they had kept this prosecution impending for another year, how much would remain for a jury to decide upon, I should be at a loss to discover. It seems as if the progress of public reformation was eating away the ground of the prosecution. Since the commencement of the prosecution this part of the libel has unluckily received the sanction of the legislature. that interval our Catholic brethren have obtained that admission which, it seems, it was a libel to propose. In what way to account for this I am really at a loss. Have any alarms been occasioned by the emancipation of our Catholic brethren? Has the bigoted malignity of any individuals been crushed? Or has the stability of the Government, or has that of the country, been weakened? Or are one million of subjects stronger than four millions? Do you think that the benefit they received should be poisoned by the sting of vengeance? If you think so you must say to them, “You have demanded emancipation, and you have got it; but we abhor your persons, we are outraged at your success; and we will stigmatise, by a criminal prosecution, the relief which you have obtained from the voice of your country." I ask you, gentlemen, do you think, as honest men anxious for the public tranquillity, conscious that there are wounds not yet completely cicatrised, that you ought to speak this language, at this time, to men who are too much disposed to think that in this very emancipation they have been saved from their own Parliament by the humanity of their sovereign? Or do you wish to prepare them for the revocation of these improvident concessions? Do you think it wise or human at this moment to insult them, by sticking up in a pillory the man who dared to stand forth their advocate? I put it to your oaths, do you think that a blessing of that kind, that a victory obtained by justice over bigotry and oppression, should have a stigma

*The jury was taken from a panel containing the names of a number of Members of Parliament.

In 1793, after the prosecution was commenced, the Irish Parliament passed a bill giving the right of suffrage to Catholics, and conferring a large part of the rights and privileges desired.

cast upon it by an ignominious sentence upon men bold and honest enough to propose that measure? To propose the redeeming of religion from the abuses of the Church, the reclaiming of three millions of men from bondage, and giving liberty to all who had a right to demand it; giving, I say, in the so-much censured words of this paper, giving "universal emancipation!" I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; which proclaims even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of "universal emancipation!" No

matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion, incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of " universal emancipation."

ON MOVING A DECLARATION OF IRISH RIGHT.*

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 Poynings, 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 you not yet been able to obtain them? And have you been contending against a little body of eighty men, in privy council assembled, convoking 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 these things will follow in the train of your consequence.

I shall be told that titles are shaken, being vested by force of English Acts. But in answer to that I observe, time may be a title, but an

Part of a speech delivered in the Irish House of Commons, 19th April 1780, its object being to move the Irish Parliament to a Declaration of Right, which should deny the authority of England to make laws for Ireland.

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 a 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 asserted, property 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 public tranquillity. In what situation would those men, who call themselves friends of constitution and 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

* A bill to be immediately introduced on passing the Declaration, by which all laws of the English Parliament affecting property were to be confirmed by the Irish Parliament.

foul disgrace of standing apart while a deadly blow is aimed at the independence of our country. The right honourable gentleman says I fled from the country after inciting rebellion, and that I have returned to raise another. No such thing. The charge is false. The civil war had not commenced when I left the kingdom, and I could not have returned without taking a part. On the one side there was the camp of the rebel; on the other the camp of the minister, a greater traitor than that rebel. The stronghold of the constitution was nowhere to be found. I agree that the rebel who rose against the Government should have suffered; but I missed on the scaffold the right honourable gentleman. Two desperate parties were in arms against the constitution. The right honourable gentleman belonged to one of these parties, and deserved death. I could not join the rebel-I could not join the Government. I could not join torture-I could not join half-hanging-I could not join free quarter. I could take part with neither. I was therefore absent from a scene where I could not be active without selfreproach, not indifferent with safety.

Many honourable gentlemen thought differently from me. I respect their opinions, but I keep my own; and I think now, as I thought then, that the treason of the minister against the liberties of the people was infinitely worse than the rebellion of the people against the minister.

I have returned, not, as the right honourable member has said, to raise another storm-I have returned to discharge an honourable debt of gratitude to my country, that conferred a great reward for past services, which, I am proud to say, was not greater than my desert. I have returned to protect that constitution, of which I was the parent and the founder, from the assassination of such men as the honourable gentleman and his unworthy associates. They are corrupt they are seditious-and they, at this very moment, are in a conspiracy against their country. I have returned to refute a libel, as false as it is malicious, given to the public under the appellation of a report of a committee of the House of Lords. Here I stand ready for impeachment or trial; I dare accusation; I defy the honourable gentleman; I defy the Government; I defy the whole phalanx. Let them come forth. I tell the ministers I will neither give them quarter nor take it. I am here to lay

the shattered remains of my constitution on the floor of this House, in defence of the liberties of my country.

My guilt or innocence has little to do with the question here. I rose with the rising fortunes of my country-I am willing to die with her expiring liberties. To the voice of the people I will bow, but never shall I submit to the calumnies of an individual hired to betray them and to slander me. The indisposition of my body has left me, perhaps, no means but that of lying down with falling Ireland, and recording upon her tomb my dying testimony against the flagitious corruption that has murdered her independence. The right honourable gentleman has said that this was not my place-that instead of having a voice in the councils of my country I should now stand a culprit at her bar-at the bar of a court of criminal judicature-to answer for my treasons. The Irish people have not so read my history, but let that pass; if I am what he said I am, the people are not therefore to forfeit their constitution. In point of argument, therefore, the attack is bad-in point of taste or feeling, if he had either, it is worse-in point of fact, it is false, utterly and absolutely false-as rancorous a falsehood as the most malignant motives could suggest to the prompt sympathy of a shameless and a venal defence. The right honourable gentleman has suggested examples which I should have shunned, and examples which I should have followed. I shall never follow his, and I have ever avoided it. I shall never be ambitious to purchase public scorn by private infamy-the lighter characters of the model have as little chance of weaning me from the habits of a life spent, if not exhausted, in the cause of my native land. Am I to renounce those habits now for ever, and at the beck of whom? I should rather say, of what ?—half a minister-half a monkey-a 'prentice politician, and a master coxcomb! He has told you that what he has said of me here he would say any where. I believe he would say thus of me in any place where he thought himself safe in say ing it. Nothing can limit his calumnies but his fear-in Parliament he has calumniated me tonight, in the King's Courts he would calumniate me to-morrow; but had he said or dared to insinuate one-half as much elsewhere, the indig. nant spirit of an honest man would have answered the vile and venal slanderer with a blow.