limited placed in the hands of _an
adverse_ description _because it is an adverse description_. And if they
who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too
frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy,
or tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with
contempt and rigor.

This is not a mere theory; though, whilst men are men, it is a theory
that cannot be false. I do not desire to revive all the particulars in
my memory; I wish them to sleep forever; but it is impossible I should
wholly forget what happened in some parts of Ireland, with very few and
short intermissions, from the year 1761 to the year 1766, both
inclusive. In a country of miserable police, passing from the extremes
of laxity to the extremes of rigor, among a neglected and therefore
disorderly populace, if any disturbance or sedition, from any grievance
real or imaginary, happened to arise, it was presently perverted from
its true nature, often criminal enough in itself to draw upon it a
severe, appropriate punishment: it was metamorphosed into a conspiracy
against the state, and prosecuted as such. Amongst the Catholics, as
being by far the most numerous and the most wretched, all sorts of
offenders against the laws must commonly be found. The punishment of low
people for the offences usual among low people would warrant no
inference against any descriptions of religion or of politics. Men of
consideration from their age, their profession, or their character, men
of proprietary landed estates, substantial renters, opulent merchants,
physicians, and titular bishops, could not easily be suspected of riot
in open day, or of nocturnal assemblies for the purpose of pulling down
hedges, making breaches in park-walls, firing barns, maiming cattle, and
outrages of a similar nature, which characterize the disorders of an
oppressed or a licentious populace. But when the evidence given on the
trial for such misdemeanors qualified them as overt acts of high
treason, and when witnesses were found (such witnesses as they were) to
depose to the taking of oaths of allegiance by the rioters to the king
of France, to their being paid by his money, and embodied and exercised
under his officers, to overturn the state for the purposes of that
potentate,--in that case, the rioters might (if the witness was
believed) be supposed only the troops, and persons more reputable the
leaders and commanders, in such