onfiscations with the memory of
which the gentlemen who triumph in the acts of 1782 are so much
delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in
1688, and the English Parliament again put up to sale the greatest part
of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this
rebellion, nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation.
The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw
himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their
feeble power. Be the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated
sovereign, against a prince whom the Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland
had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion
more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them.
In generous minds some small degree of compassion might be excited for
an error, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a conqueror, _quadam
specie et similitudine pacis_, not without a mistaken appearance of
duty, and for which the guilty have suffered, by exile abroad and
slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best
calculators compute that Ireland lost two hundred thousand of her
inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and
Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am
it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For, if
the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same
principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish
Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of
rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked,
not for any designs against _their_ religion or _their_ liberties, but
for an extreme partiality for their sect, and who, far from trespassing
on _their_ liberties and properties, secured both them and the
independence of their country in much the same manner that we have seen
the same things done at the period of 1782,--I trust the last revolution
in Ireland.

That the Irish Parliament of King James did in some particulars, though
feebly, imitate the rigor which had been used towards the Irish, is true
enough. Blamable enough they were for what they had done, though under
the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or
counter-confiscations as long as I live. When they happen by necessity,
I shall think the necessity l