reversionary addition to that of the church: upon its principle it was rejected by the influence of government, and of that very government who had before declared the bill to be the best ever brought into parliament. Three bills had been introduced in 1788—one for rape, another for flax, and a third for barren land. The ministry compromised that two should be sacrificed to the bishops, and one should be conceded to the country. They went farther, and their attorneygeneral* declared, that the bill in question, namely, the barren land bill, was the best ever brought into parliament; and he took on himself the modelling some clauses to secure the assent of the bishops. The bishops, or some who led them, were then supposed to have broken faith with government, as government after broke its engagement with the country, and rejected this very best of all possible bills on the worst of all possible motives for the votes of the bishops in parliament. They-the ministers-sold this bill; they sold it to the lords spiritual, just as they had before sold their honours to the lords temporal. Such a step would scarce be credible, except under an administration who had prevaricated on the subject of the propositions, under whose venal auspices seats of justice, peerages, the establishment, and now the bills and proceedings of parliament, like their own talents and activity, were all sold for parliamentary compliances. I congratulate the church on its alliance with such ministers of the Crown. But let me assure them, it will not serve their promotion; they live under an administration which has but two principles of promotion, for church or law-ENGLISH RECOMMENDATION and IRISH CORRUPTION. What is the case of Doctor Kirwan? That man preferred this country and our religion, and brought to both a genius superior to what he found in either: he called forth the latent virtues of the human heart, and taught men to discover in themselves a mine of charity, of which the proprietors had been unconscious; in feeding the lamp of charity he had almost exhausted the lamp of life; he comes to interrupt the repose of the pulpit, and shakes one world with the thunder of the other. The preacher's desk becomes the throne of light; around him a train, not such as crouch and swagger at the levees of princes (horse, foot, and dragoons), but that wherewith a great genius peoples his own state-charity in action and vice in humiliation; vanity, arrogance, and pride, appalled by the rebuke of the preacher, and cheated for a moment of their native * Mr Fitzgibbon. nprobity. What reward? St. Nicholas Within or St. Nicholas Without!! The curse of Swift is upon him-to have been born an Irishman, to have possessed a genius, and to have used his talents for the good of his country. Had this man, instead of being the brightest of preachers, been the dullest of lawyers; had he added to dulness venality; had he aggravated the crime of venality, and sold his vote, he had been a judge; or, had he been born a blockhead. bred a slave, and trained up in a great English family, and handed over as a household circumstance to the Irish viceroy, he would have been an Irish bishop and an Irish peer, with a great patronage, perhaps a borough, and had returned members to vote against Ireland, and the Irish parochial clergy must have adored his stupidity and deified his dulness. But under the present system, Ireland is not the element in which a native genius can rise, unless he sells that genius to the court, and atones by the apostacy of his conduct for the crime of his nativity. Unde derivata hæc clades? In five words I will tell you-in the trade of parliament. It is a matter to consider how a man bred up in the school of liberty, how a foreigner would speak to you ON YOUR PRESENT SITUATION; he would perhaps address the gentlemen of this House in the following manner: You put on the sword, and would have drawn it for your freedom, and failing, you had died in the field, or had bled on the scaffold. In that event, the attorneygeneral, on the part of the Crown, had prosecuted, and the chiefjustice had pronounced sentence, and the boys of your court would have shouted at the execution of the patriots. How comes it that of the men that would have been your executioners, some of them have become your ministers? Your madness is not become a general disease. We do not find that the English, after their revolution, made Father Peter Archbishop of Canterbury, or that General Bender has placed Vandernoot at the head of the Imperial army. America had enemies, but she disposed of them in a different manner. You have put into commission your enemies, and you have banished your friends. We see with astonishment, and in it we blush for the abortive efforts of national spirit, the mortifying insignificance of public opinions, and the degrading contempt into which the people of your country have fallen, with all their shouts and addresses. We see your old general* who led you to your constitution, march off-dismissed by your ministry as unfit to be trusted with the government of a county-the cockade of government struck from Lord Charlemont, late governor of Armagh, Х his hat. That man, whose accomplishments gave a grace to you: cause, and whose patriotism gave a credit to your nobles; whom the rabble itself could not see without veneration, as if they beheld something not only good, but sacred. The man who, drooping and fainting when you began your struggles, forgot his infirmity, and found in the recovery of your constitution a vital principle added to his own. The man who, smit with the eternal love of fame and freedom, carried the people's standard till he planted it on the citadel of freedom-see him dismissed from his government for those very virtues, and by that very ministry for whose continuance you are to thank the king. See him overwhelmed at once with the adoration of his country, and the displeasure of her ministers. The history of nations is oftentimes a farce. What is the history of that nation that, having, at the hazard of everything dear in a free constitution, obtained its mistress, banishes the champion, and commits the honour of the lady to the care of the ravisher? There was a time when the vault of liberty could hardly contain the flight of your pinion; some of you went forth like a giant rejoicing in his strength, and now you stand like elves at the door of your own pandemonium. The armed youth of the country, like a thousand streams, thundered from a thousand hills, and filled the plain with the congregated waters, in whose mirror was seen for a moment the watery image of the British constitution; the waters subside, the torrents cease, the rill ripples within its own bed, and the boys and children of the village paddle in the brook. Sir, whenever freedom shall be properly understood, depend upon it, the gentlemen of this country will be ashamed of the condition they bear, and the questions they have made upon it. In the mean time, I can account for their patience; the Irish are accustomed to be trodden upon; uniformly, says Junius, has Ireland been plundered and oppressed. It is not so in England: defective in some particulars as the constitution of England may still be, yet, with all these defects, England has a constitution, and she has also maxims as well as laws to preserve it. They have not been blessed in England with a succession of lord-lieutenant's secretaries, whose sole occupation has been to debauch the political morality of the gentlemen of the island. No minister will venture to tell the gentlemen of England that they must be bought: no man will venture to say, that the best minister is he who buys parliament the cheapest. Men do sometimes desert and oppose their own party, but not themselves and their own list of measures A man does not in England publicly cross the house to reverse every part of his conduct, and then holl out his little paw to the minister like a pennyboy. There was, indeed, one man in England supposed to have done so; but he was in England a prodigy; let me add, he had been Irish secretary in Ireland. The people of this country supposed that England acceded to their liberties, and they were right; but the present ministry have sent the curse after that blessing. Hear the curse! You have got rid of the British Parliament, but we will buy the Irish; you have shaken off our final judicature, but we will sell yours; you have got your free trade, but we will make your own parliament suffer our monopolists in one quarter of the globe to exclude you; and you shall remain content with the right, destitute of the possession. Your corporate rights shall be attacked, and you shall not stir; the freedom of your press and the personal freedom of the subject shall be outraged, and you shall not arraign; your city shall be put under contribution to corrupt its magistracy, and pay a guard to neglect and insult her; the seats of justice shall be purchased by personal servitude, and the qualification of your judges shall be to have borne their suffrage and testimony against the people. Taxes shall be drawn from the poor by various artifices to buy the rich; your bills, like your people, shall be sold; you shall see the genius of your country neglected, her patriotism dismissed from commission, and the old enemies of your constitution made the rulers of the realm. CATHOLIC QUESTION. Os the 4th of February, Mr. Hobart had obtained leave to bring in a bill for the further relief of the Roman Catholics: the bill was presented and read a îrst time on the 18th, and ordered to be read a second time on this day; and when the order of the day for the second reading was moved for, Mr. George Knox said, that from the moment he felt political independence, he found the necessity of Catholic emancipation. The present bill did not admit the Catholics into the constitution; that the upper as well as the lower orders should be the objects for legislative liberality, and as the admission of ten or twenty Catholics into parliament would not, in his opinion, endanger the safety of the state, he would move: "That the Roman Catholics should be permitted to hold seats in parliament". Mr. Knox's motion being inconsistent with the order of proceeding, the bill was read a second time; and on the question that it be committed, it was warmly supported by the provost (Mr. Hutchinson), Mr. Forbes, Mr. Day (afterwards judge), Mr. Hobart, Mr. W. B. Ponsonby, Colonel Hutch inson, and Major Doyle; it was opposed by Mr. Richard Sheridau, Mr. George Ogle Mr David Latoncha and Dr. Duigenan. N Mr. GRATTAN said: I could wish the bill under your cons.dera tion had gone farther. I could wish that it had given the Roman Catholics the privileges of other dissenters. I am sure that is only sound policy. I think, however, the bill deserves thanks, because it contains much, and also because it leads to much more; but I must say the mover had discovered more sense if he had given to the Catholics the whole now, and had settled with them for ever. The situation of the Roman Catholics is reducible to four propositions: they are three-fourths of your people, paying their proportion of near £2,000,000 of taxes, without any share in the representation or expenditure; they pay your church establishments without any retributions; they discharge the active and laborious offices of life, manufacture, husbandry, and commerce, without those franchises which are annexed to the fruits of industry; and they replenish your armies and navics, without commission, rank, or reward. Under these circumstances, and under the further recommendation of total and entire political separation from any foreign prince or pretender, they desire to be admitted to the franchise of the constitution. I have listened to your objections with great respect-give me leave to answer them. The first objection I heard, is the petition of the Catholics to his Majesty; but who is there that does not see the question to be, whether the Catholics are aggrieved, and not how those grievances have been stated by their committee? But even on the ground of the petition, if as in a case of bill and answer, you choose to wrangle, you will find their petition is substantially true; it complains that the Catholic, by law, cannot carry arms—the law is so; it complains that the Catholics, on refusing to discover their arms, are liable to be whipped-that law is yet in force; and finally it states, the great and radical grievance, that the Catholics are excluded from the franchises of the constitution. And about that complaint there is no doubt. The petition therefore, cannot justify a refusal to administer redress, even if their redress depended on the manner of forming their petition. But the second objection goes on broader and bolder grounds, and insists on the demerits of the Catholics. It states, that the Catholics abhor all Protestants, and never were. nor are, nor ever will be, loyal subjects to a Protestant king; and it asserts in particular, that in every war, and in two rebellions since the Revolution, the Catholics have exerted themselves to the best of their power against their king and country, and have besides been guilty of various domestic insurrections. The last part of the objection scarcely deserves notice. It proposes that the Catholic inhabitants of thirty-two counties should be punished for the disturbances of six; |