ence, that established injustice and corruption should be overthrown, and that such laws as are oppressive or partial should be laws no longer. And is this only to be effected by violence? or does not experience shew that steady perseverance in a just cause mostly renders violence unnecessary; and that truth, when sealed by the labours, the sufferings, nay, if it be needful, even the blood of its advocates, at last shames the few who have continued longest to oppose it from any further struggle against it? Or when its converts are become so numerous that it is no more a small body of individuals striving to reform a corrupt state of society, but the society itself is divided, each division containing within itself the elements of a distinct social existence, numbers, and wealth, and rank, and intelligence; by what other laws can their mutual relations be judged, than by those which apply not to individuals the subjects of one society, but to the several societies of the human race themselves, who acknowledge no common law but that founded on the eternal principles of justice? Then if a contest ensue, its lawfulness must be decided on the same grounds which determine our judgment of national wars; one party must incur deep guilt in drawing the sword; but to which the guilt is to be attached depends solely on the merits of the question at issue, and in no degree on the former relation which subsisted between them while they were parts of the same society.

I may be allowed, perhaps, to notice one other impression, which tends strongly to indispose many minds à priori to what are called liberal principles: and this is the notion that the advocates for improvement rest their cause solely on theory, that the existing state of things may, indeed, be often liable to objection on abstract printiples, but that, practically, it works and has worked well. No answer has been more frequent than this in the mouths of the enemies of Reform; none, perhaps, has so often satisfied the rising scruples of honest but ignorant

minds, and persuaded them that they may shut their eyes upon the evils which they see around them, for that the whole system, with its evil and its good, has had the sanction of experience; and that the plans proposed for its amendment are but the dreams of ingenious theorists, the mere imagination of intellectual enthusiasts. Now this belief, so injurious to our own moral improvement, as it accustoms us to a contented acquiescence in moral evil, is either altogether founded on falsehood, or is wholly inapplicable to the conclusions which they who inculcate it wish to make its practical consequence. It is false that experience sanctions existing institutions, and that theory alone objects to, them. What is called theory is, in fact, a wider experience than that which pretends exclusively to the name. The practical man sets his own individual experience, limited in place, and most span-like in duration, against that accumulated experience of many countries and all ages, whose conclusions he calls a theory. He presumes to judge of the whole by that small part of it which he has himself witnessed: he has seen the first stages only of intoxication, and knowing nothing but from his own observation, he calls it mere theory, when he is told that the short-lived merriment and animation which had so charmed him would surely be followed by stupefaction and nausea. The effect of institutions can only be judged of after an experience far longer than the longest life of an individual; nor will one single specimen inform us how far local or temporary causes may have. aggravated or softened their inherent properties. They must be watched from their origin to their extinction ; their natural consequences must be distinguished from their accidental results; the experiment must be tried on various subjects in order to be satisfied that its operation is uniform; before we can be fairly said to judge of them from experience. But this true experience, furnishing, indeed, a safe and universal rule, is no other than what is often called theory; unattainable to the vulgar, because it

alike exceeds their perseverance, their grasp of mind, and their capacities of discrimination; and hated by the ignorant and low-principled, because it is at once above their reach, and because its lessons offer no apology for institutions founded on injustice, and supported by selfishness and folly.

So far, then, it is false that men who are well acquainted with persons and things now existing, men who have mixed extensively in society in their own country, but whose knowledge of other times and other countries is exceedingly imperfect, have any right to put their experience on a level with that far more universal experience which thinking and inquiring minds have gained from a comprehensive study both of the present and the past. But if many of the advocates for reform in various parts of our institutions have been theorists in the true meaning of the term, if they have ventured to form conclusions on an imperfect induction, or from some defect in themselves have proposed systems almost as faulty as those which they wished to alter, they individually may be undeserving of confidence; yet this failure affords not the shadow of an excuse for the vaunts of their adversaries. "Even a one-eyed man is a king amongst the blind;" and the glimmering of twilight is better than the thick darkness on which it has begun to dawn. Let the light, indeed, shine more and more unto the perfect day; but let us not so complain of the indistinctness of the dawn as to prefer the unbroken obscurity of midnight. Let those who complain of the ill-grounded theories of reformers reprove their fault in the best manner, by working their way themselves to a fuller knowledge; but let them not rest contented in the very depths of ignorance, because those who have assayed to soar into a purer region have been unable in their first trial to escape altogether beyond the range of the mists of the valley.

But is there, then, so much to learn; and have our forefathers indeed lived in so intense a darkness?

Let any

Christian look first upon the volume of the New Testament, and then turn his eyes to the existing state of society, to the wars of ambition, to the conquests, the persecutions, the corruptions, the sufferings, the low principles, and lower practice, which have prevailed during the last eighteen hundred years, amidst men who have professed the Christian faith, and called themselves the redeemed and sanctified people of God! Alas! for the words of Christ's Prayer, so often repeated in mockery, when we daily beg of God that his kingdom may come, whilst our institutions, our principles, and our practice uphold the kingdom of another master! Alas! for the unfulfilled promises of the older prophecies, whose accomplishment has been so long hindered, while we either regard them as a splendid vision of eastern fancy, or murmur and are offended because the blessings designed for a world that should be the image of Heaven have found no place amidst our evil passions and abounding iniquity! Dissatisfaction with ourselves is wisdom, but it is the most fatal folly to gaze with regret upon the past, rather than to turn with an eager and inquiring hope to the future. We are not worse than our fathers; it is shame enough that we are not more advanced than we are beyond their exceeding badness; but our desire should be to be ten thousand times better; not looking back to the things behind, but pressing forward to those that are before, until we grow up into the perfect man; into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

I write as a Christian to Christians, and I have thought it neither irrelevant to my particular subject, nor generally unimportant, to endeavour to point out the unchristian tendency of those prejudices in favour of past times and established institutions which with too many close the ears and the understanding against the claims of truth and justice. Whereas he who knows the origin of society and its actual vicissitudes on the one hand, and has learnt from Christ's Gospel to understand what it ought to be on

the other, will at once see that the antiquity of an institution does not afford a presumption in favour of its excel lence; and that instead of idle language about holding fast to the laws of our ancestors, our constant object should be to carry on those successive improvements to which all that is good in them is owing; not to doat upon the productions of our childhood, but to labour to bring them to the perfection of the ripest wisdom of manhood. And we shall find that in the consideration of our immediate subject these general principles are peculiarly applicable.

The origin of the present form of civil society in Ireland was conquest; and, what was more unfavourable to the establishment of just institutions, it was a conquest obtained over a barbarous people by another scarcely less barbarous, and of a race and language at once distinct and dissimilar. Now in that order of God's providence by which even our wickedness is sometimes made to promote his purposes of good, it cannot be denied that the ultimate consequences of conquest have been in many instances highly beneficial to the conquered themselves; a better national character has been produced by the intermixture of different races, and laws, commerce, and general civilization have been communicated by the conquerors to their subjects. To talk in this case of a continued right in the conquered people to regain by force. that which they had lost by force is palpably foolish, for in a few generations there are neither conquerors nor conquered remaining, but one united people sprung from the intermixture of both, and professing in its improved moral and physical condition reasons for remembering only with thankfulness the cause which first brought its two elements into contact. But where the wounds inflicted by the first conquest have never been suffered to heal; where the conquerors have continued to form a distinct people, and the conquered have been regarded as an inferior race; where conquest, in short, has never been softened into

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