, whose ordinary residence should be in
Great Britain, had been adopted and avowed by his Majesty's
ministers at that time. A remonstrance against this measure,
as highly unjust and impolitic, was presented to the
ministers by several of the principal Irish absentees, and
the project was subsequently abandoned.

LETTER.

Dear Sir,--I am much flattered by your very obliging letter, and the
rather because it promises an opening to our future correspondence. This
may be my only indemnification for very great losses. One of the most
odious parts of the proposed Absentee Tax is its tendency to separate
friends, and to make as ugly breaches in private society as it must make
in the unity of the great political body. I am sure that much of the
satisfaction of some circles in London will be lost by it. Do you think
that our friend Mrs. Vesey will suffer her husband to vote for a tax
that is to destroy the evenings at Bolton Row? I trust we shall have
other supporters of the same sex, equally powerful, and equally
deserving to be so, who will not abandon the common cause of their own
liberties and our satisfactions. We shall be barbarized on both sides of
the water, if we do not see one another now and then. _We_ shall sink
into surly, brutish Johns, and _you_ will degenerate into wild Irish. It
is impossible that we should be the wiser or the more agreeable,
certainly we shall not love one another the better, for this forced
separation, which our ministers, who have already done so much for the
dissolution of every other sort of good connection, are now meditating
for the further improvement of this too well united empire. Their next
step will be to encourage all the colonies, about thirty separate
governments, to keep their people from all intercourse with each other
and with the mother country. A gentleman of New York or Barbadoes will
be as much gazed at as a strange animal from Nova Zembla or Otaheite;
and those rogues, the travellers, will tell us what stories they please
about poor old Ireland.

In all seriousness, (though I am a great deal more than half serious in
what I have been saying,) I look upon this projected tax in a very evil
light; I think it is not advisable; I am sure it is not necessary; and
as it is not a mere matter of finance, but involves a political question
of much, importance, I consider the principle and precedent as far worse
than the thing itself. You are too kind in imagi