debt and public exigencies to be great and urgent
beyond example. You certainly acted in a great style, and on sound and
invincible principles. But if we in the opposition, which fills Ireland
with such loyal horrors, had even attempted, what we never did even
attempt, the smallest delay or the smallest limitation of supply, in
order to a constitutional coercion of the crown, we should have been
decried by all the court and Tory mouths of this kingdom, as a desperate
faction, aiming at the direct ruin of the country, and to surrender it
bound hand and foot to a foreign enemy. By actually doing what we never
ventured to attempt, you have paid your court with such address, and
have won so much favor with his Majesty and his cabinet, that they have,
of their special grace and mere motion, raised you to new titles, and
for the first time, ill a speech from the throne, complimented you with
the appellation of "faithful and loyal,"--and, in order to insult our
low-spirited and degenerate obedience, have thrown these epithets and
your resistance together in our teeth! What do you think were the
feelings of every man who looks upon Parliament in an higher light than
that of a market-overt for legalizing a base traffic of votes and
pensions, when he saw you employ such means of coercion to the crown, in
order to coerce our Parliament through _that_ medium? How much his
Majesty is pleased with _his_ part of the civility must be left to his
own taste. But as to us, you declared to the world that you knew that
the way of bringing us to reason was to apply yourselves to the true
source of all our opinions and the only motive to all our conduct! Now,
it seems, you think yourselves affronted, because a few of us express
some indignation at the minister who has thought fit to strip us stark
naked, and expose the true state of our poxed and pestilential habit to
the world! Think or say what you will in Ireland, I shall ever think it
a crime hardly to be expiated by his blood. He might, and ought, by a
longer continuance or by an earlier meeting of this Parliament, to have
given us the credit of some wisdom in foreseeing and anticipating an
approaching force. So far from it, Lord Gower, coming out of his own
cabinet, declares that one principal cause of his resignation was his
not being able to prevail on the present minister to give any sort of
application to this business. Even on the late meeting of Parliament,
nothing determinate could