it
possible for Irishmen of every creed to speak in one voice to
the Government. Their respective clergy, hitherto so intent on
ecclesiastical claims and pretensions, will no longer pass by on the
other side, but turn Samaritans to their bleeding country, fallen
among the thieves of Bigotry and Faction. There are many high
Protestants--indeed, I may say all, except the aristocracy--who, while
firmly believing in the vital importance of the union of the three
kingdoms, earnestly wishing that union to be real and perpetual,
cannot help expressing their conviction that Ireland has been greatly
wronged by England--wronged by the legislature, by the Government,
and most of all by the crown. In no country in the world has loyalty
existed under greater difficulties, in none has it been so ill
requited, in none has so much been done as if of set purpose to
starve it to death. In the reign of Elizabeth the capricious will of
a despotic sovereign was exerted to crush the national religion, while
the greatest military exploits of her ablest viceroys consisted of
predatory excursions, in which they slaughtered or carried away the
horses and cattle, burned the crops and houses, and laid the country
waste and desolate, in order to create famines for the wholesale
destruction of the population, thus spoiled and killed as a punishment
for the treason of their chiefs, over whom they had no control.

In the reigns of James I. and Charles I. there was a disposition among
the remnant of the people--

To fly from petty tyrants to the throne.

But the Stuarts appealed to Irish loyalty merely for the support of
their dynasty, and William III. laid the laurels won on the banks of
the Boyne upon the altar of English monopoly. In the reigns of Anne
and the three Georges, law was made to do the work of the sword, and
the Catholics of Ireland, constituting the mass of the nation,
knew their sovereign only as the head of an alien power, cruel and
unrelenting in its oppression. They were required to love a German
prince whom they had never seen. He called himself the father of
his subjects; and he had millions of subjects on the other side of a
narrow channel, whom he never knew, and never cared to know. When at
length the dominant nation relented, and wished to strike the penal
chains from the hands of her sister, the king forbade the act of
mercy, pleading his conscience and his oath as a bar to justice and to
freedom, but yielding at last