should issue as a gift of her
bounty and beneficence, rather than as claims recovered against a
struggling litigant,--or at least, that, if your beneficence obtained no
credit in your concessions, yet that they should appear the salutary
provisions of your wisdom and foresight, not as things wrung from you
with your blood by the cruel gripe of a rigid necessity. The first
concessions, by being (much against my will) mangled and stripped of the
parts which were necessary to make out their just correspondence and
connection in trade, were of no use. The next year a feeble attempt was
made to bring the thing into better shape. This attempt, (countenanced
by the minister,) on the very first appearance of some popular
uneasiness, was, after a considerable progress through the House, thrown
out by _him_.

What was the consequence? The whole kingdom of Ireland was instantly in
a flame. Threatened by foreigners, and, as they thought, insulted by
England, they resolved at once to resist the power of France and to cast
off yours. As for us, we were able neither to protect nor to restrain
them. Forty thousand men were raised and disciplined without commission
from the crown. Two illegal armies were seen with banners displayed at
the same time and in the same country. No executive magistrate, no
judicature, in Ireland, would acknowledge the legality of the army which
bore the king's commission; and no law, or appearance of law, authorized
the army commissioned by itself. In this unexampled state of things,
which the least error, the least trespass on the right or left, would
have hurried down the precipice into an abyss of blood and confusion,
the people of Ireland demand a freedom of trade with arms in their
hands. They interdict all commerce between the two nations. They deny
all new supply in the House of Commons, although in time of war. They
stint the trust of the old revenue, given for two years to all the
king's predecessors, to six months. The British Parliament, in a former
session, frightened into a limited concession by the menaces of Ireland,
frightened out of it by the menaces of England, was now frightened back
again, and made an universal surrender of all that had been thought the
peculiar, reserved, uncommunicable rights of England: the exclusive
commerce of America, of Africa, of the West Indies,--all the
enumerations of the Acts of Navigation,--all the manufactures,--iron,
glass, even the last pledge of jealousy a