against that
Parliament, or could rebel against the king, against whom both he and
the Parliament which he served, and which he betrayed, had both of them
rebelled.

The gentlemen who hold the language of the day know perfectly well that
the Irish in 1641 pretended, at least, that they did not rise against
the king: nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put
upon their act. But full surely they rebelled against the authority of
the Parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do. Admitting
(I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable
magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in
those of their children and their grandchildren, even to the fifth and
sixth generations. Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural
rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that
it must be avenged forever? Will it follow that it must be avenged on
thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of those whom they can never
trace, by the labors of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction
of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the
descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion
against the Parliament of England?

If, however, you could find out those pedigrees of guilt, I do not think
the difference would be essential. History records many things which
ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor
policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson
does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson
us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when
we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To
that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They
ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations
which formerly inflamed the furious factions which had torn their
country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and
abominable things which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured,
robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly
revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully
exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years
after, to find some color for justifying them in the eternal
proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.

Let us come to a later period of those c