cessors of the forfeiting proprietors, chargeable in part with the
uses. Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human
creature in Ireland? It is bounty, it is charity,--wise bounty, and
politic charity; but no man can claim it as a right. Here no such thing
is claimed as right, or begged as charity. The demand has an object as
distant from all considerations of this sort as any two extremes can be.
The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna
Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the
fruits of their industry. They call for no man's estate; they desire not
to be dispossessed of their own.

But this melancholy and invidious title is a favorite (and, like
favorites, always of the least merit) with those who possess every other
title upon earth along with it. For this purpose they revive the bitter
memory of every dissension which has torn to pieces their miserable
country for ages. After what has passed in 1782, one would not think
that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by
magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible
confiscatory and exterminatory periods. They would not set men upon
calling from the quiet sleep of death any Samuel, to ask him by what act
of arbitrary monarchs, by what inquisitions of corrupted tribunals and
tortured jurors, by what fictitious tenures invented to dispossess whole
unoffending tribes and their chieftains. They would not conjure up the
ghosts from the ruins of castles and churches, to tell for what attempt
to struggle for the independence of an Irish legislature, and to raise
armies of volunteers without regular commissions from the crown in
support of that independence, the estates of the old Irish nobility and
gentry had been confiscated. They would not wantonly call on those
phantoms to tell by what English acts of Parliament, forced upon two
reluctant kings, the lands of their country were put up to a mean and
scandalous auction in every goldsmith's shop in London, or chopped to
pieces and out into rations, to pay the mercenary soldiery of a regicide
usurper. They would not be so fond of titles under Cromwell, who, if he
avenged an Irish rebellion against the sovereign authority of the
Parliament of England, had himself rebelled against the very Parliament
whose sovereignty he asserted, full as much as the Irish nation, which
he was sent to subdue and confiscate, could rebel