kerseys, beetle-wood and prunellas, nothing is safe, satisfactory, or honorable; nothing, except a Declaration of Right! What! Are you, with three millions of men at your back, with charters in one hand and arms in the other, afraid to say, We are a free people? Are you the greatest House of Commons that ever sat in Ireland, that want but this one act to equal that English House of Commons which passed the Petition of Right, or that other, which passed the Declaration—are you, are you afraid to tell the British Parliament that you are a free people? Are the cities and the instructing counties, who have breathed a spirit that would have done honor to old Rome, when Rome did honor to mankind-are they to be free by connivance? Are the military associations-those bodies whose origin, progress, and deportment have transcended, equalled, at least, anything in modern or ancient story, in the vast line of Northern array-are they to be free by connivance? What man will settle among you? Who will leave a land of liberty and a settled government for a kingdom controlled by the Parliament of another country; whose liberty is a thing by stealth; whose trade a thing by permission; whose judges deny her charters; whose Parliament leaves everything at random; where the hope of freedom depends on the chance that the jury shall despise the judge stating a British act, or a rabble stop the magistrate in the execution of it, rescue your abdicated privileges by anarchy and confusion, and save the constitution by trampling on the government?

But I shall be told that these are groundless jealousies, and that the principal cities, and more than one-half the counties of the kingdom, are misguided men, raising those groundless jealousies. Sir, they may say so, and they may hope to dazzle with illuminations, and they may sicken with addresses, but the public imagination will never rest, nor will her heart be well at ease; never, so long as the Parliament of England claims or exercises legislation over this country. So long as this shall be the case that very free trade (otherwise a perpetual attachment) will be the cause of new discontent. It will create a pride and wealth, to make you feel your indignities; it will furnish you with strength to bite your chain; the liberty withheld poisons. the good communicated. The British minister mistakes the Irish character. Had he intended to make Ireland a slave, he should have kept her a beggar. There is no middle policy. Win

her heart by a restoration of her right, or cut off the nation's right hand; greatly emancipate, or fundamentally destroy! We may talk plausibly to England; but so long as she exercises a power to bind this country, so long are the nations in a state of war. The claims of the one go against the liberty of the other, and the sentiments of the latter go to oppose those claims to the last drop of her blood.

The English Opposition, therefore, are right; mere trade will not satisfy Ireland. They judge of us by other great nations; by the English nation, whose whole political life has been a struggle for liberty. They judge of us with a true knowledge and just deference for our character, that a country enlightened as Ireland, armed as Ireland, and injured as Ireland, will be satisfied with nothing less than liberty. I admire that public-spirited merchant who spread consternation at the custom-house, and, despising the example which great men afforded, tendered for entry prohibited manufactures, and sought, at his private risk, the liberty of his country. With him, I am convinced it is necessary to agitate the question of right. In vain will you endeavor to keep it back; the passion is too natural, the sentiment too irresistible; the question comes on of its own vitality. You must reinstate the laws.

There is no objection to this resolution except fears. I have examined your fears; I pronounce them to be frivolous. If England is a tyrant, it is you have made her so. It is the slave that makes the tyrant, and then murmurs at the master whom he himself has constituted. I do allow, on the subject of commerce, England was jealous in the extreme; and I do say, it was commercial jealousy; it was the spirit of monopoly. The woollen trade and the Act of Navigation had made her tenacious of a comprehensive legislative authority, and, having now ceded that monopoly, there is nothing in the way of our liberty except our own corruption and pusillanimity. Nothing can prevent your being free, except yourselves; it is not in the disposition of England, it is not in the interest of England, it is not in her force. What! can eight millions of Englishmen, opposed to twenty millions of French, seven millions of Spanish, to three millions of Americans, reject the alliance of three millions in Ireland? Can eight millions of British men, thus outnumbered by foes, take upon their shoulders the expense of an expedition

to enslave Ireland? Will Great Britain, a wise and magnanimous country, thus tutored by experience and wasted by war, the French navy riding her channel, send an army to Ireland to levy no tax, to enforce no law, to answer no end whatever, except to spoliate the charters of Ireland, and enforce a barren oppression?

What! has England lost thirteen provinces? has she reconciled herself to this loss, and will she not be reconciled to the liberty of Ireland? Take notice, that the very constitution which I move you to declare, Great Britain herself offered to America: it is a very instructive proceeding in the British history. In 1778 a commission went out with powers to cede to the thirteen provinces of America totally and radically the legislative authority claimed over her by the British Parliament; and the commissioners, pursuant to their powers, did offer to all, or any of the American States, the total surrender of the legislative authority of the British Parliament. I will read you their letter to the Congress. [Here the letter was read, surrendering the power, as aforesaid.] What! has England offered this to the resistance of America, and will she refuse this to the loyalty of Ireland? 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 questions of right, every quay and wharf with prohibited goods. What shall the judges, what the commissioners, do upon such occasion? Shall they comply with the laws of Ireland against the claims of England, and stand firm where you have trembled? Shall they, on the other hand, not comply; and shall they persist to act against the law? Will you punish them, 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 your liberties to be trampled on by those men? Will you bring them and yourselves, all constituted orders, executive power, judicial power, parliamentary authority, 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 irritating timidity, of inflammatory palliations, of the weak and corrupt hope of compromising with the court before you have emancipated the country.

I have answered the only semblance of a solid reason against the motion. I will now try to remove some lesser pretences, some minor impediments; for instance: first, that we have a resolution of the same kind already in our journals. But how often was the Great Charter confirmed? Not more frequently than your rights have been violated. Is one solitary resolution, declaratory of your rights, 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 by precedents, and a nation's rights lost in oblivion, and the people themselves lose the memory of their own freedom.

I shall hear of ingratitude, and name the argument to despise 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 wretched 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 or usurpation, nothing is an object of gratitude, except the thing stolen, the charter spoliated. A nation's liberty cannot, like her money, be rated and parcelled out in gratitude. No man can be grateful or liberal of his conscience, nor woman of her honor, nor nation of her liberty. There are certain inimpartable, 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; seeing that Ireland asks nothing but that which

Great Britain has robbed her of-her rights and privileges. To say that Ireland is not to be satisfied with liberty, because she is not satisfied 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 you not 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 Parliament, and ministering your high office; and have you been contending against one man, an humble individual, to you a leviathan-the English AttorneyGeneral, 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 those 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 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 mouldering 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

A bill to be immediately introduced on passing the Declaration, by which all laws of the English Parliament affecting proper

ty were to be confirmed by the Irish Parliament.