sion; and yet these measures have not only proved to be useful bu are held to be moderate, and the Parliament that adopted them, praised, not for its unanimity only, but for its temper also. You now wonder that you submitted for so many years to the loss of the woollen trade and the deprivation of the glass trade; raised al ve yer former abject state in commerce, you are ashamed at your past pusi animity;, so when you have summoned a boldness which shall assert the liberties of your country-raised by the act, and reinvested, as you will be, in the glory of your ancient rights and privileges, you will be surprised at yourselves, who have so long submitted to their violation. Moderation is but a relative term; for nations, like men, are only safe in proportion to the spirit they put forth, and the proud contemplation with which they survey themselves. Conceive yourselves a plantation, ridden by an oppressive government, and everything you have done is but a fortunate phrenzy: conceive yourselves to be what you are, a great, a growing, and a proud nation, and a declaration of right is no more than the safe exercise of your indubitable authority.

But, though you do not hazard disturbance by agreeing to this resolution, you do most exceedingly hazard tranquillity by rejecting it. Do not imagine that the question will be over when this motion shall be negatived. No; it will recur in a vast variety of shapes and diversity of places. Your constituents have instructed you in great numbers, with a powerful uniformity of sentiment, and in a style not the less awful because full of respect. They will find resources in their own virtue, if they have found none in yours. Public pride and conscious liberty, wounded by repulse, will find ways and means of vindication. You are in that situation in which every man, every hour of the day, may shake the pillars of the state; every court may swarm with the question of right; every quay and wharf with prohibited goods: what shall the Jadges, what the Commissioners, do upon this occasion? Shall they comply with the laws of Ireland, and against the claims of England, and stand firm where you have capitulated? shall they, the other hand, not comply, and shall they persist to act against the law? will you punish them if they do so? will you proceed against them for not showing a spirit superior to your own? On the other hand, will you not punish them? Will you leave liberty to be trampled on by those men? Will you bring them and yourselves, all con stituted orders, executive power, judicial power, and parliamentary an thority, into a state of odium, impotence, and contempt; transferring the task of defending public 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 irri

tating timidity, of inflammatory palliatives, of the weak and corrupt hope of compromising with the court, befo you have emancipated

the country.

I have answered the only semblance of a solid reason against the motion; I will remove some lesser pretences some minor impediments; for instance, first, that we hav a resolution of the same kind already on our Journals, it will be said; but how often was the great charter confirmed? not more frequently than your rights have been violated. Is one solitary resolution, declaratory of "our right, 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 with precedents to their prejudice, a nation's right obliterated, and the people themzelves lose the memory of their own freedom.

I shall hear of ingratitude: I name the argument to despise it and the men who make use of it: I know the men who use it are not grateful, they are insatiate; they are public extortioners, who would stop the tide of public prosperity, and turn it to the channel of their own 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 and usurpation, nothing is an object of gratitude except the thing stolen, the charter spoliated. A nation's liberty cannot, like her treasures, be meted 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 unimpartable, 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; saying, that Ireland asks nothing but that which Great Britain has robbed her of, her rights and privileges; to say that Ireland will not be satisfied with liberty, because she is not natisfied with slavery, is folly. 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 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 sarliament, and ministering your high office? and have you beca

2

2

contending against one man, an humble individual, to you a Levia-
thian the English Attorney-general-who advises in the case of Irish
bills, and exercises legislation in his own person, and makes your
parliamentary deliberations a blank, by altering your bills or sup-
pressing them? and have you not yet been able to conquer 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, acquiescence a
title, forfeiture 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 in Ireland have already dis-
claimed 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 (Mr. Yelverton), has a Bill of
Confirmation; we do not come unprepared to Parliament. I am not
come to shake property, but to confirm property and 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 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 of
government have left you? They would have left you without a title,
as they state it, to your estates, without an assertion of your constitu-
tion, or a law for your army; and this state of unexampled private
and public insecurity, this anarchy raging in the kingdom for eighteen
months, these mock moderators would have had the presumption to
call peace.

I shall be told, that the judges will not be swayed by the resolution of this House. Sir, that the judges will not be borne down by the resolutions of Parliament, not founded in law, I am willing to believe; but the resolutions of this House, founded in law, they will respect most exceedingly. I shall always rejoice at the independent spirit of the distributors of the law, but must lament that hitherto they have given no such symptom. The judges of the British nation, when they adjudicated against the laws of that country, pleaded precedent and the prostration and profligacy of a long tribe of subservient predecessors, and were punished. The judges of Ireland, if they should be called upon, and should plead sad necessity, the thraldom of the times, and above all, the silent fears of Parliament, they, no doubt, will be

23

excused: but when your declarations shall have protected them from their fears; when you shall have emboldened the judges to declare the law according to the charter, I make no doubt they will do their duty; and your resolution, not making a new law, but giving new life to the old ones, will be secretly felt and inwardly acknowledged, and there will not be a judge who will not perceive, to the innermost recess of his tribunal, the truth of your charters and the vigour of your justice.

The same laws, the same charters, communicate to both kingdoms, Great Britain and Ireland, the same rights and privileges; and one privilege above them all is that communicated by Magna Charta, by the 25th of Edward the Third, and by a multitude of other statutes, "not to be bound by any act except made with the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and freemen of the commonalty", viz. of the parliament of the realm. On this right of exclusive legislation are founded the Petition of Right, Bill of Right, Revolution, and Act of Settlement. 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 declaratory statute of the 6th of George the First an act of usurpation; for both cannot be law.

I do not refer to doubtful history, but to living record; to common charters; to the interpretation England has put upon these charters; an interpretation not made by words only, but crowned by arms; to the revolution she had formed upon them, to the king she has deposed, and 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 these very charters.

And as anything 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 history, we are too much fired by hei example, to be anything less than her equal; anything 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

A

27

enemies, insulted with her protection, while we returned thanks for her condescension, is a system of meanness and misery which has expired in our determination, as I hope it has in her magnanimity.

There is no policy left for Great Britain but to cherish the remains of her empire, and do justice to a country who is determined to do justice to herself, certain that she gives nothing equal to what she received from us when we gave her Ireland.

With regard to this country, England must resort to the free principles of government, and must forego that legislative power which she has exercised to do mischief to herself; she must go back to freedom, which, as it is the foundation of her constitution, so is it the main pillar of her empire; it is not merely the connection of the crown, it is a constitutional annexation, an alliance of liberty, which is the true meaning and mystery of the sisterhood, and will make both contries one arm and one soul, replenishing from time to time, in their immortal connection, the vital spirit of law and liberty from the lamp of each other's light; thus combined by the ties of common interest, equal trade and equal liberty, the constitution of both countries may become immortal, a new and milder empire may arise from the errors of the old, and the British nation assume once more her natural station-the head of mankind.

That there are precedents against us I allow-acts of power I would call them, not precedent; and I answer the English pleading such precedents, as they answered their kings when they urged precedents against the liberty of England: Such things are the weakness of the times; the tyranny of one side, the feebleness of the other, the law of neither; we will not be bound by them; or rather, in the words of the declaration of right, "no doing judgment, proceeding, or anywise to the contrary, shall be brought into precedent or example ". Do not then tolerate a power-the power of the British Parliament over this land, which has no foundation in utility or necessity, or empire, or the laws of England, or the laws of Ireland, or the laws of nature, or the laws of God,-do not suffer it to have a duration in your mind.

Do not tolerate that power which blasted you for a century, that power which shattered your loom, banished your manufactures, dishonoured your peerage, and stopped the growth of your people; do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woollen, or an import of sugar, and permit that power which has thus withered the land to remain in your country and have existence in your pusillanimity.

Do not suffer the arrogance of England to imagine a surviving hope in the fears of Ireland; do not send the people to their own resolves for liberty, passing by the tribunals of justice and the high court of