ant and Papist can make any change in
the nature of essential justice. Such men will not allow that to be
proper treatment to the one of these denominations which would be
cruelty to the other, and which converts its very crime into the
instrument of its defence: they will hardly persuade themselves that
what was bad policy in France can be good in Ireland, or that what was
intolerable injustice in an arbitrary monarch becomes, only by being
more extended and more violent, an equitable procedure in a country
professing to be governed by law. It is, however, impossible not to
observe with some concern, that there are many also of a different
disposition,--a number of persons whose minds are so formed that they
find the communion of religion to be a close and an endearing tie, and
their country to be no bond at all,--to whom common altars are a better
relation than common habitations and a common civil interest,--whose
hearts are touched with the distresses of foreigners, and are abundantly
awake to all the tenderness of human feeling on such an occasion, even
at the moment that they are inflicting the very same distresses, or
worse, on their fellow-citizens, without the least sting of compassion
or remorse. To commiserate the distresses of all men suffering
innocently, perhaps meritoriously, is generous, and very agreeable to
the better part of our nature,--a disposition that ought by all means to
be cherished. But to transfer humanity from its natural basis, our
legitimate and home-bred connections,--to lose all feeling for those who
have grown up by our sides, in our eyes, the benefit of whose cares and
labors we have partaken from our birth, and meretriciously to hunt
abroad after foreign affections, is such a disarrangement of the whole
system of our duties, that I do not know whether benevolence so
displaced is not almost the same thing as destroyed, or what effect
bigotry could have produced that is more fatal to society. This no one
could help observing, who has seen our doors kindly and bountifully
thrown open to foreign sufferers for conscience, whilst through the same
ports were issuing fugitives of our own, driven from their country for a
cause which to an indifferent person would seem to be exactly similar,
whilst we stood by, without any sense of the impropriety of this
extraordinary scene, accusing and practising injustice. For my part,
there is no circumstance, in all the contradictions of our most
mysterio