union, but retains all the harshness of its original features, aggravated by successive centuries of irritation; such a state of things is a perpetual crime, and the original guilt of the conquerors must for ever extend to their posterity, so long as, by neglecting to remedy or palliate its evil consequences, they make themselves a party to it. It is too late then to talk of the inconveniences of extending the rights of citizens to those whose peculiar opinions disqualify them for an union with their conquerors. We brought them forcibly into our national society, and we must not shrink from the just consequences of our own act. And the plea of conscience, when urged as an excuse for not offering atonement for our crime, while we continue to profit by its fruits, is no better than self-deceit and hypocrisy. If Protestants urge that they cannot allow Catholics to have any voice in the government, why did they bring a Catholic people into political connection with themselves? If they so dread the infection of Catholic opinions, why do they oblige Catholics to live and breathe in the same society with themselves? But this they have chosen to do; and if their health be endangered, they have only themselves to thank for it.

In saying this, it will not be supposed that I am gravely arguing in favour of a total separation between this country and Ireland. When I urge that those who refuse to do Ireland justice, and make conscience their plea for the refusal, are bound not to be conscientious only where it suits their own interests, but to make restitution in full if they scruple at coming to a fair compromise; I mean to shew the futility of their plea, and to insist that it is only a deceived or self-deceiving conscience which advances it. In fact, it is a plea which would dissolve the whole fabric of society throughout Europe, and would make it impossible for men of different religions to live together as fellow-citizens, if they mutually insisted upon their own exclusive supremacy. The connection between this country and Ireland is not now to be torn asunder; the injus

tice which we have done cannot now in that manner be rendered undone; but it is our bounden duty to remedy its actual evil effects. What ought to have been done long since should at least no longer be delayed; we should hasten to remove all those marks of our original violence, which leave us still guilty till they are wiped away: we should make it as impossible even to dream of a separation with Ireland, as to break up England itself into the original elements of its heptarchy.

But it has been urged by Lord Bexley that the Catholics of Ireland are not the Irish nation; that we are united with the Protestants of Ireland, and that they, politically speaking, constitute Ireland. Thus it is that the language of municipal law, so often the mere organ of power, is quoted to give an imposing sanction to injustice. What are the Protestants of Ireland but military colonies planted by the conquering nation in a conquering province, who can only have a distinct existence so long as the evils of conquest are unatoned for, and the tenure is one of might and not of right. Such in the reign of Augustus were the colonies of Narbo, Vienna, and Lugdunum in Gaul; of Corduba and Hispalis in Spain; and whilst these alone possessed the privileges of citizenship, whilst these alone were regarded by the Romans as enjoying legal existence, so long was the connection with Gaul and Spain forced and insecure, so long were the massacres and spoliations of the first Cæsar an enduring crime of the Roman government. But the Italian war had taught the Romans a memorable lesson; and the statesmen and lawyers of Rome were not incapable of profiting by the experience of the past. Within sixty years after the death of Augustus, the rights of Roman citizens were bestowed on all the free inhabitants of Gaul, and from that period Gaul was truly united to the empire, her old language and her old customs were gradually forgotten, and the bonds which bound her to Italy could only be torn asunder by the general convulsion of the civilized world. To con

sider, then, the Protestants of Ireland as the Irish nation. is merely to perpetuate the injustice of our original conquest; to say that, although inferior in numbers, they possess a great superiority in property, is to keep alive the memory of those sweeping confiscations which transferred the soil of Ireland to the conquerors, and of those more atrocious laws which, down to the year 1778, forbade the Irish Catholic to become a purchaser of land in his own. country. Who can wonder, that if we on our part still display the trophies of victory, the majority of the Irish people should cherish a bitter recollection of their defeat? that if we, till within the last fifty years, so far abused the rights of conquest as to hinder the conquered from regaining by peaceful industry the property which they had lost, they should have remembered how they had lost it, and by what means alone they could expect to recover a share of it? The stream of events cannot flow backward, nor is there any fear that the injustice of our conquest will be removed by an opposite injustice: unless we obstinately refuse ourselves to obliterate its traces, and persist in treating Ireland as a conquered province, where our Protestant colonies alone are to enjoy the rights of citizens.

It may be urged as a last plea for still calling upon Parliament to persevere in the iniquities of our ancestors, that exclusion from the full rights of citizenship is not directed against the Irish Catholics as Irishmen, but as Catholics; and that the Catholics of England are in some respects subjected to still greater disqualifications. This also is one of those arguments which men are liable to advance, while they want the knowledge or the ability to connect the present state of things with the causes that produced it. That the majority of the Irish people are Catholics at this hour is almost demonstrably owing to the English conquest, combined with the neglect of those measures which repair the evil of conquest. Had Ireland been left to herself she would have experienced in all

human probability the same course of events with the other countries of the North of Europe. Her kings

would have become impatient of the papal pretensions; her aristocracy would have been jealous of the wealth and consequence of the Church; her Commons would have been alienated by the unworthy lives of the clergy; and with these predisposing causes to aid them, the doctrines of the reformers would have taken root as effectually as they did in Scotland and in England. Or had conquest been followed by an effectual union; had we known how to improve, and conciliate, and civilize, as well as we understood the arts of slaughter and confiscation, Ireland would have had one heart with England, and Connaught and Munster would have opposed no greater obstacles to Protestantism than Cornwall and Cumberland; it would have been merely the slowness of ignorance, and not the deep aversion of national hatred. But now Ireland is Catholic because Protestantism was associated in her eyes with subjugation and oppression; she clung the more fondly to her superstitions because they were renounced and persecuted by her enemy. And who can doubt but that the dread and hatred of Popery which prevailed in England during the seventeenth century were at least. greatly aggravated by causes arising out of her political relations with Ireland. If there was one thing more than another which made Popery detestable, it was the Irish rebellion and massacre of 1642: or, at a later period, the support which Ireland gave to James the Second, and the Acts of James's Irish Parliament in 1689. Now, although religious animosity had a great share in the violences of both these periods; yet it was so mixed up with feelings of national and political hatred, that they ought not to be regarded as the mere effects of Catholic bigotry, but as the atrocious vengeance of a barbarous people upon those who had conquered and held them in subjection. In all these cases, to remember only the wickedness of the retaliation, and to pass over the injustice which provoked it,

is at once morally and politically blameable. Let us abhor as much as we will the individual actors in scenes of cruelty, but let us not think that their guilt can cancel ours; or that because evil has been overthrown by worse evil, that therefore we are justified in restoring and upholding it.

Once again, it is urged by some that the disabilities imposed on the Catholics are no other than all governments may enact in their discretion upon particular classes of their subjects: and parallels are sought for in the law which disables clergymen from sitting in the House of Commons; and in those which make the possession of a certain amount of income an indispensable qualification for a member of the legislature, or even for an elector in the county election. With respect to the privilegium against Horne Tooke, for such in fact it was, which assumed the thin cloak of a general principle to cover its real motives of personal aversion and fear, it is difficult to conceive how one act of injustice can be a defence for another; and the depriving the clergy of their rights as citizens, when their old rights as a distinct order in the State had been taken from them, was a measure worthy of the suspicions and violence of the time at which it was effected. But to require in a legislator the possession of such wealth as ought fairly to place him above any corrupt temptation, is allowed by the highest authorities in political science to be a provision for the common benefit; and it is a principle equally just and beneficial, however particular circumstances may sometimes require. it to be modified, that he who has no interest in the maintenance of society, should have no voice in the choice of those who are to defend and govern it. But even admitting that it were otherwise, yet there is one great distinction between these laws of disqualification and those which affect the Catholics of Ireland. The clergy form one particular profession; the poor form one particular class in society; but they are intermingled