vereignty of their country, are
forced to squabble with such a man as Mr. Spencer Perceval for five
thousand pounds with which to educate their children in their own mode
of worship; he, the same Mr. Spencer, having secured to his own
Protestant self a reversionary portion of the public money amounting
to four times that sum.... Our conduct to Ireland, during the whole of
this war, has been that of a man who subscribes to hospitals, weeps at
charity-sermons, carries out broth and blankets to beggars, and then
comes home and beats his wife and children. We have compassion for the
victims of all other oppression and injustice, except our own."

It is of no use for statesmen to ignore the Irish question. It is much too
urgent and too dangerous a topic to be long suppressed.--

"A man may command his family to say nothing more about the stone, and
surgical operations; but the ponderous malice still lies upon the
nerve, and gets so big that the patient breaks his own law of silence,
clamours for the knife, and expires under its late operation. Believe
me, you talk folly when you speak of suppressing the Irish question. I
wish to God that the case admitted of such a remedy ... but, if the
wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord
Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be
heard ere long in the madness of mobs, and the conflicts of armed
men."

In Letter V. Peter turns upon Abraham, who cannot believe that England will
ever be ruined and conquered, and says:--

"Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian
Plymleys. But the English are brave? So were all these nations. You
might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but,
without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as
useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or
Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the disparagement of
English officers: they have had no means of acquiring experience. But
I do say it to create alarm. We do not appear to me to be half alarmed
enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the
most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit of the
peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through
plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do no