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one million to Great Britain, you must borrow men from Great Britain to defend and garrison yourselves. Calculate then, that in persisting to disfranchise the Catholic, you make him adverse; three millions are to be put into the other scale, which would be a difference of six millions, that is nearly one half of the whole empire. It follows from this, that your policy is prejudicial to the British empire as well as to the throne.

I have considered your situation and your arguments. A situation of extraordinary peril. Arguments of extraordinary weakness, of monopoly, of panic, of prejudice, of anything but religion; arguments which, like the fabric they would sustain, cannot stand the proof of any trial; nor the principles of morality, nor those of religion, nor those of policy, nor those of constitution; neither the touch of time nor the revolutions of mankind. Their tendency is to make freedom a monopoly, which is like an endeavour to make the air and the light a monopoly; their tendency is to make God a monopoly. I have heard of monopolies of salt, monopolies of rice, monopolies of corn, but here is a monopoly of the Almighty; and yet the persons who use these arguments are men of talents. Compare, compound, abstract; but, in this instance, the string of their madness, so strangely perplexed in the intellectual function, one should think God had smitten the intellect of the country, as well as her fortunes, with some distinguished imbecility. Suppose a will impeached for insanity, and it appeared in evidence that the testator had, in his capacity as a general officer, taken powder and ball from one half of his battalion, because they believe in the real presence, or, when sick, had refused to take a specific from Dr. Purcel, declaring that he had confidenco in his medicine, but had no faith in his sacrament; or had disinherited his own son because his son's wife did not understand theclogy; or had fallen on his knees to return thanks to God for His universal blessings, and then had risen up and dealt out imprecations on three-fourths of the people about him; or proclaimed that as long as a Protestant prince was on the throne, three-fourths of his subjects should be disfranchised. Would not that evidence, which is nothing more than a compound of your piety and your policy, if applied to the case of an individual, compeì twelve honest men, on their oaths, to find a verdict of insanity?

I have read of a republic, where the whole business of life was neglected to give place to mathematical investigation. I can suppose a more extraordinary state, where the law excluded from serving the public three-fourths of the people, uniess they wou give ↑ theological opinion touching an abstract point of divinity, and verit,

that opinion on oath. I have heard of Athens, that crucl republic, excluding so many of her own children from the rights of citizenship; but she had only the wisdom of Socrates and the light of Plato: she had not, like you, revelation to instruct her; besides she had not the press-she had not the benefits of your lesson. What lesson? that to a people it is not life, but the condition of living; and that to be bound without your own consent, was to be a slave; and, therefore, you were not satisfied in 1782 with the free exercise of your r·ligion. However, I do not rely on your private productions. What are your public tracts, your repeated addresses to the King, the Speaker's annual speech to the throue? what are they, while the penal code remains, but so many dangerous and inflammatory publications, felicitating the Protestants on the blessings of that constitution from whence three-fourths of your people are excluded; but, above all, that instrument, infinitely more incendiary than all Mr. Paine has written, that instrument which you annually vote; what is it but a challenge to rebellion? I mean a money bill, wherein you dispose of the money of 3,000,000 of the people without their You do not stir, nor vote, nor speak, without suggesting to the Catholics some motive, either the provocation of your blessings, or the poison of your free priuciples; some motive, I say, which is fatal to that state of quietude wherein, during this age of discussion, you must inlay your people in order to give your government the chance of repose.

Consent.

You are struggling with difficulties you imagine; you are mis. taken; you are struggling with impossibilities. To enchain the nind, to case in the volatile essential soul, nor tower, nor dungeon. much less parliament, can be retentive of those fires kindled by your selves in the breasts of your fellow-subjects. I would have you at this time distrust that religious vanity which tells you that these mer are not fit for freedom; they have answered that vanity in a strain of oratory peculiar to the oppressed. It is the error of sects to value themselves more upon their differences than their religion; and in these differences, in which they forget the principles of their religions, they imagine they have discovered the mystery of salvation, and to this supposed discovery they have offered human sacrifices. What human sacrifices have we offered? the dearest-the liberties of our fellow-subjects. Distrust again that fallacious policy which tells you your power is advanced by their bondage; it is not your power, but your punishment: it is liberty without energy; you know it. It presents you with a monopoly, and the monopoly of others, not your own. It presents you with the image of a monster in a state

where the heart gives no circulation and the limbs receive no life; a nominal representative, and a nominal people. Call not this your misfortune; it is your sentence; it is your execution. Never could the law of nature suffer one set of men to take away the liberty of another, and that of a numerous part of their people, without a dimrution of their own strength and freedom. But, in making laws on the subject of religion, legislators forget mankind until their own distraction admonishes them of two truths; the one, that there is a God; the other, that there is a people. Never was it permitted to any nation; they may perplex their understandings with various apologies, but never was it long permitted to exclude from essential, from what they themselves have pronounced essential blessings, a great portion of themselves for periods of time, and for no reason, or, what is worse, for such reasons as you have advanced.

Conquerors, or tyrants proceeding from conquerors, have scarcely ever for any length of time governed by those partial disabilities; but a people so to govern itself, or rather, under the name of government so to exclude itself—the industrious, the opulent, the useful; that part that feeds you with its industry, and supplies you with its taxes, weaves that you may wear, and ploughs that you may eat: to exclude a body so useful, so numerous, and that for ever; and, in the mean time, to tax them ad libitum, and occasionally to pledge their lives and fortunes! for what? For their disfranchisement. It cannot be done; contin'e it, and you expect from your laws what it were blasphemy to ask of your Maker. Such a policy always turns on the inventor, and bruises him under the stroke of the sceptre or the sword, or sinks him under accumulation of debt and loss of dominion. Need I go to instances? What was the case of Ireland? enslaved for a century, and withered and blasted with her Protestant ascendancy, like a shattered oak scathed on its hill by the fires of its own intolerance. What lost England America, but such a policy? An attempt to bind men by a parliament wherein they are not represented; such an attempt as some would now continuo to practise on the Catholics, and involve England. What was it saved Ireland to England, but the contrary policy? I have scen these principles of liberty verified by yourselves. I have heard addresses from counties and cities here on the subject of the slave trade to Mr. Wilberforce, thanking him for his efforts to set free a distressed people: has your pity traversed leagues of sea to sit down by the black boy on the coast of Guinea, and have you forgot the man at home by your side, your brother? Come then, and by one great act cancel this code, and prepare your mind for that bright

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order of time which now seems to touch your condition. But I have tired you; suffer me to sit down, and thank you for your patient

attention.

ANTI-JACOBIN WAR.

February 5, 1794.

On this day, Sir Laurence Parsons (afterwards Lord Rosse) moved, "That an humble address be presented to His Excellency the Lord-lieutenant, that he will be pleased to lay before His Majesty the humble desire of this House, that His Majesty will graciously condescend to order to be laid before this House copies of his declaration, together with copies of the several conventions and treaties with different powers which have been laid before the British Parliament, relative to the present war". The motion was seconded by Mr. William Tighe, and was supported by Mr. Sergeant Duquery, Mr. Curran, Mr. Egan, Dr. Browne, Mr. Robert Stewart (afterwards Lord Castlereagh), on the ground that the Irish Parliament, as a matter of right as well as duty and interest, was bound to investigate the causes of the war. The motion was opposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir J. Parnell), Mr. Cooke, Mr. Barrington, Mr. G. Ponsonby, and Mr. Beresford.

MR. GRATTAN said: Sir, however I may differ from gentlemen with whom I generally concur, I shall this night, consistent with the vote I gave on the first day of the session in favour of the war, resist the present measure. I do not doubt that the honourable gentlemen who introduced it had very proper motives. The motion before you, purports to be a motion for papers; but the declared object of its supporters is to condemn the war-that war which those gentlemen pledged themselves to support, and for which they now declare themselves determined to grant the army and the supply. On the ground, therefore, laid for this motion, by those who have supported the honourable baronet, I shall give it a direct negative, as tending to undermine your own proceedings, to retract your plighted sentiments, and to raise a mutiny against your own taxes. Such a proceeding would, in my mind, bear a colour of hesitation, unbecoming the honour of this country, and by such conduct Ireland would prove herself, instead of the best, the meanest ally of England. Some gentlemen, in support of the motion, have not indeed gone so far as to condemn the war, but have only desired to suspend their opinion until they receive the copies of the treaties, declarations, and conventions from England; and in the meantime they declare

themselves ready to vote the army and the supply for this very war, en which they declare they have formed no opinion whatever. ] dwell not on the folly of such a proceeding; I tremble at the mischief. What! tell France (an invasion impending perhaps on one or both of these countries) that you have not made up your minds on the war: thus excite a diffidence on the part of Great Britain: teach Fran te to consider Ireland as desponding, and induce her to intrigue with our people and attempt a descent upon our country; tell her, that you are waiting on a revolutionary-state opinion, until papers shall be sent from England, and a committee shall sit flagrante bello, and have made its report on the causes, considerations, and merits of this war. The period is said to be awful. If anything could make it desperate, it would be such a condition. It would be a promulgation to the troops on the coast of France, that we were not decided to stand by England, and that this was the moment in which the suspense of our sentiments was to be determined by some stroke from that country. Considering the principle of this motion in reference to Great Britain, you told her in the opening of this session you would stand by her in this war. You tell her now by this motion that you beg leave to consider it, and have therefore called for papers in order to form a deliberate judgment on mature and late consideration. Is not this a retraction of your foriner opinion? Is not this chilling your own efforts? changing a positive pledge to support a war, into a languid disposition to inquire into its origin, while England remains, in the interin, in doubt, whether she can depend on you, whether you will not take the lead In the desertion, or, as has been the tendency of some speeches to-night, whether, while you affect to support her by your arms yon may not damn that support by your censure, and declare that you think France is in the right, though you support Great Britain.

As to your own people, see the effect of such a motion. You tax them for the war; you tell them at the same time, in this motion, that you have not as yet made up your mind upon the subject you profess an utter ignorance of the justice and propriety of those taxes, and enable the people to tell you that they are taxed by parliament for a war, the grounds, justice, and necessity of which that parliament declares itself a stranger to, and is only now in a state of inquiry. Thus you arm your own people against your own taxes by your on authority. I want to know, say gentlemen, v'hether this war is to partition France, to exterminate its liberty, and to set up the old constitution? whether it is to be persevered in to the last drop of our blood, rather than treat with the existing government?