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channel. This, it will be said, would be absurd; but consider whether you are acting upon a principle of greater intrinsic wisdom, when, after provoking the resentments, you arm and martialize the ambition of men, under the vain assurance, that Providence will work a miracle in the constitution of human nature, and dispose it to pay injustice with affection, oppression with cordial support. This is, in fact, the true character of your expectations; nothing less than that the Author of the Universe should subvert his laws, to ratify your statutes, and disturb the settled course of nature; to confirm the weak, the base expedients of man. What says the decalogue? Honour thy father. What says the penal law? Take away his estate! Again, says the decalogue, do not steal. The law, on the contrary, proclaims, you may rob a Catholic! The great error of our policy is, that it presupposes, that the original rights of our nature may be, violated with impunity, in imagining that a transgression of natural law, can be punished only hereafter. But there is an immediate, as well as a future retribution, and a remedy provided by natural causes for this obstruction of natural justice. The early effect of the promulgation of the penal code in Ireland, was to confound tyrant and slave, Protestant and Catholic, in one common mass of misery and insignificance.

A new law against English Catholics, was made in the reign of George II., and mark the result! when a militia force of 6,000 was wanted, it could not be raised. The Duke of Cumberland, son of George II., would not allow a man to be recruited in Ireland, except perhaps a weaver from the north. And what was the consequence? We met our own laws at Fontenoy. The victorious troops of England were stopped in their career of triumph by that Irish brigade which the folly of the penal laws had shut out from the ranks of the British army.

A little attention will show us, that, in the same proportion as we have conceded to the Catholic, have we grown strong and powerful by our indulgence; and that we have been the blind instruments of our own misfortunes, and of inflicting judgment on ourselves, by refusing justice to our fellow-subjects. If it be contended that to support the church it is expedient to continue these disabilities, I dissent from that opinion. If it could indeed be proved, I should say that you had acted in defiance of all the principles of human justice and freedom, in having taken away their church from the Irish, in order to establish your own; and in afterwards attempting to secure that establishment, by disqualifying the people, and compelling them at the same time to pay for its support. This is to fly directly in the face of the plainest canons of the Almighty.

For the benefit of eleven hundred, to disqualify four or five millions, is the insolent effort of bigotry, not the benignant precept of Christianity, and all this not for the preservation of their property, for that was secured; but for bigotry, for intoler ance, for avarice, for a vile, abominable, illegitimate, and atrocious usurpation. The laws of God cry out against it; the spirit of Christianity cries out against it; the laws of England, and the spirit and principles of its constitution cry out against such a system.

An honourable member once expressed his apprehension, that the Catholic, if admitted to a seat in Parlia ment, would exert himself to promote the interests of his own religion, and to dispossess the church of England. I must remind the House, however, that it is contrary to every principle of legislation to inflict penalties on supposed offenders, or to punish imaginary crimes, and to deal out chastisement in advance. I ask them to remember, that by the oaths of the Catholics, oaths which we are bound to believe, we have their solemn engagement to defend and preserve the constitution as by law established. If you acknowledge that the church can only be supported on the ruins of Irish liberty, then I say that the church ought not, and cannot, be so supported. The church was established, that men might resort to it for consolation and hope; it was not made for the King, or for the Court, or for men of fashion exclusively. For the people, it was instituted; and by its beneficial. effects on the people, must its excellence be appreciated. It was with this persuasion, that the Kirk was established in Scotland; but widely different was the policy with respect to Ireland. Upon no other principle, however, can the church be really recognized as the house of God. It is no longer than it adheres to that principle, that it has any foundation in Christianity; when it deserts it, it becomes the asylum of pride, of avarice, of bigotry; an establishment nourished. by the worst vices of our nature; and fulfilling its baneful purposes, unlike the church of a Christian God, by dividing, oppressing, and apostatizing mankind. In a political sense, the Irish hold every thing by the same tenure as their fellow-subject in England; the landlord and tenant claim equally by virtue of the act of settlement. If the government of England chose to say, that the church of Ireland is not to be secured by law; by the allegiance of the people; by the coincidence between the people and their liberties, but by the title of right and claim of conquest; if they so chose to blaspheme their title, they must then come to this; they must pause to consider be tween the laws of God and the policy of man; they must put

their own wisdom into one scale, and in the other, to be weighed against it, place the Almighty!

Let us avoid any situation, approaching to such a state of things. Upon these various considerations, I submit it to the good sense and justice of the House, that such remaining penalties and incapacities, as attach upon the Catholics, should be removed, that we may unite them with ourselves in a common feeling, in a common cause. I freely admit, that if there should recur a period when a French Pope might occupy the pontifical chair, it would be necessary to guard against the exercise of his influence in the nomination of bishops. This, however, is an additional reason, I conceive, to induce the House to go into a committee, in which this particular branch of the question may be fairly discussed. I shall ever be as earnest as any man in my wishes and exertions, to prevent the chaos and horrors of foreign invasion, or foreign domination.

It has been asserted, that what the Catholics claim is of little value. This is a poor argument against acceding to it. If one person robbed another, would it be any defence of his honesty to urge that, what he had stolen, was of little value to the owner? I know there are some, who are for entering into certain stipulations with the Catholics; this is foolish. You can never gain any thing with a people by conditions: it is the silliest thing on earth to think of conciliating by merchandizing their claims. Many there are, some I know, who imagine, that the Irish Catholic is indifferent as to the fate of these demands. However, that is not the question; you have no right to ask them whether they desire, but ask yourselves whether it is just to grant. If you really think them so careless on the subject, all you have established by the argument is this, "We, by our bad government, have so debili'tated you, so broken your hearts, and debased your spirits, that even liberty has become of no account amongst you, and you have no understanding to prize its blessings." Will this be a matter of boast to England? But liberty is not to be made the creature of circumstance or condition. England ought to know this. What made her, what inspired, what raised her to such eminence in the world as that on which she now stands, but this inherent spirit of liberty; this spirit, 'which she was never so reduced as not to think worth contesting for. Did Mr. Hampden think so? was he so senseless? did he not think, that a naked freeman was a nobler object than a superb slave?

It has been said, that the Catholics of Ireland are too poor and too senseless, to wish for any removal of their disqualifications. By the return made to government, it appears that

the expenditure of that country, which was but lately not more than one million, has been seven, eight, and ten millions. To say, that a country which expends ten millions is too poor for liberty, is false and preposterous. Before the Union, the expenditure of Ireland was, 1,600,000l.; and her debt three millions she had then a free trade, and a free constitution. Since that, she has gone on increasing in debt, and expenditure; she has contributed to England, exclusive of her cattle, her provisions, her men, above sixty-five millions of money; she is the hundred-handed giant, and holding out to you in. every hand a benefit. Therefore, when you say to her, that she is too poor for liberty, you talk in language unknown to England; you do not speak the dialect of the people. Depend upon it, when you address Ireland in this jacobite phrase, you will not argue her out of her wish for liberty; but you will argue England out of her respect for her freedom. When you once sully your lips with this meanness, this baseness, and this servitude, you will not convey the poison to her, but you will cast a taint upon your own land, and your own constitution. You need not gloss over your injustice by the idea, that what you refuse is trifling. The Catholics have wisely refrained from stating their grievances in this petition. But what they are excluded from, is not a bauble. Do you know what the privileges are, which you refuse to the Irish Roman Catholics? Do you think they merely relate to some insignificant baubles, or that they are merely confined to the obtaining seats in Parliament? They are excluded from seats in this House; from offices in the bank; from the situation of sheriff; from the best places at the bar; from the highest stations in the army; from any participation in the state. They are deprived of their civil liberties; they are galled by tithes; and what remedy do you offer them? Nothing!

While these grievances remain to be removed, let it not be said, that the Irish are indifferent to them. You wound the Catholic, by taking away from him his civil capacity, and then you vote tithes upon him. You have marked him out as an object of degradation; you have separated him by disqualification from his Protestant brethren. One set of men are at court, and the other are not. You instigate the lower orders to revile each other; and if once a servant of the Crown be permitted to revile and degrade any portion of His Majesty's subjects, that portion cannot be said to be free; that portion is in every sense degraded.

It has been said, that the oath of the chief magistrate is a hindrance to any farther extension of privileges to the Catholics. We suppose this oath to be a check, and we suppose

this check immutable with respect to alleviating, but changeable with respect to grinding the subject. But this oath can by no means in any sense be construed as an obstacle to the privileges of the Catholics. The imposition of the qualification oath did not take place with regard to Ireland till 1782, because the English Parliament had no right to impose any such oath. What then has been done since the Union? You have taken from us a Parliament where Catholics were admissible, and brought us into a Parliament where, by the oath of the King, it is pretended that Catholics are inadmissible. And this is what we have got then by the Union According to this interpretation, the Union was a most monstrous innovation, for it supposes that religion depends alone for support on pains and penalties; that is, that it is false, and that it does not stand on its own evidence; it supposes that religion is merely a state trick, and that the first magistrate can alone preserve it by the infliction of pains and penalties.

It has been said, that the disqualifying oath is a fundamental law of the land. There are, I will allow, laws which are fundamental; liberty is one of the fundamental principles of our nature; and the laws which support these fundamental principles must be fundamental laws. The declaration of rights, for example, is a fundamental law; but the laws which deprive the Catholics of their liberty are not fundamental. In this way you would have two sorts of fundamental laws; you would have the laws which support and maintain you in the possession of your own privileges, and the laws which consiga the privileges of the Catholics to damnation; as if the liberties of 10,000,000 of men could only be secured by making 4,000,000 the enemy of that 10,000,000. We must always remember, that to endear a constitution to a people, it must not be unjust towards them; and that if a people are interested in a constitution, the more likely is that constitution to be lasting. What are the terms of this oath? It declares that mass is to be held in abhorrence, and that it is an idolatry; that is to say, that all those Catholic nations who have been your allies are idolaters; that the Prince Regent of Portugal, whom you are bound to establish on his throne, is an idolater; the Emperor of Austria is an idolater; the King of the Two Sicilies is an idolater; that the people of Portugal, to whom you formerly voted one million, and lately two millions, are idolaters; the Spaniards, your own fellow-subjects of Canada, and four-fifths of your fellow-subjects of Ireland, are all idolaters. Thus the qualification of an English gentleman to serve in Parliament is a libel on his allies, and a libel on his fellow-subjects. It is not easy indeed in all to draw the line

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