their
character, tell me if you have treated them as friends and equals?
Have you protected their commerce? Have you respected their religion?
Have you been as anxious for their freedom as your own? Nothing of all
this. What then? Why you have confiscated the territorial surface of
the country twice over: you have massacred and exported her
inhabitants: you have deprived four-fifths of them of every civil
privilege: you have at every period made her commerce and manufactures
slavishly subordinate to your own: and yet the hatred which the Irish
bear to you is the result of an original turbulence of character, and
of a primitive, obdurate wildness, utterly incapable of civilisation.
The embroidered inanities and the sixth-form effusions of Mr. Canning
are really not powerful enough to make me believe this; nor is there
any authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ Church)
which could make it credible to me. I am sick of Mr. Canning. There is
not a 'ha'porth of bread to all this sugar and sack.' I love not the
cretaceous and incredible countenance of his colleague. The only
opinion in which I agree with these two gentlemen is that which they
entertain of each other. I am sure that the insolence of Mr. Pitt, and
the unbalanced accounts of Melville, were far better than the perils
of this new ignorance:--

Nonne fuit satius, tristes Amaryllidis iras
Atque superba pati fastidia? nonne Menalcan?
Quamvis ille _niger_?

In the midst of the most profound peace, the secret articles of the
Treaty of Tilsit, in which the destruction of Ireland is resolved
upon, induce you to rob the Danes of their fleet. After the expedition
sailed comes the Treaty of Tilsit, containing no article, public or
private, alluding to Ireland. The state of the world, you tell me,
justified us in doing this. Just God! do we think only of the state of
the world when there is an opportunity for robbery, for murder, and
for plunder; and do we forget the state of the world when we are
called upon to be wise, and good, and just? Does the state of the
world never remind us that we have four millions of subjects whose
injuries we ought to atone for, and whose affections we ought to
conciliate? Does the state of the world never warn us to lay aside our
infernal bigotry, and to arm every man who acknowledges a God, and can
grasp a sword? Did it never occur to this administration that they
might virtuously get hold of a force ten times