on; and we cannot wonder that it was so, since the Government
which had driven them from their native land, ceased not to persecute
them in the land of their exile.[565] The first naval engagement was
fought under the command of Jeremiah O'Brien, an Irishman.[566] John
Barry, also an Irishman, took the command of one of the first
American-built ships of war. The first Continental Regiment was composed
almost exclusively of Irish-born officers and men, and was the first
Rifle Regiment ever organized in the world. Thompson, its first, and
Hand, its second colonel, were natives of Ireland. At the siege of
Boston the regiment was particularly dreaded by the British.

In 1764 Franklin came to England[567] for the second time, and was
examined before the House of Commons on the subject of the Stamp Act. He
was treated with a contemptuous indifference, which he never forgot; but
he kept his court suit, not without an object; and in 1783, when he
signed the treaty of peace, which compelled England to grant humbly what
she had refused haughtily, he wore the self-same attire. Well might the
immortal Washington say to Governor Trumbull: "There was a day, sir,
when this step from our then acknowledged parent state, would have been
accepted with gratitude; but that day is irrevocably past."

In 1774, Burke was called upon by the citizens of Bristol to represent
them in Parliament, and he presented a petition from them to the House
in favour of American independence; but, with the singular inconsistency
of their nation, they refused to re-elect him in 1780, because he
advocated Catholic Emancipation.

The same principle of justice which made Burke take the side of America
against England, or rather made him see that it would be the real
advantage of England to conciliate America, made him also take the side
of liberty on the Catholic question. The short-sighted and narrow-minded
politicians who resisted the reasonable demands of a colony until it was
too late to yield, were enabled, unfortunately, to resist more
effectually the just demands of several millions of their own people.

It is unquestionably one of the strangest of mental phenomena, that
persons who make liberty of conscience their boast and their watchword,
should be the first to violate their own principles, and should be
utterly unable to see the conclusion of their own favourite premises. If
liberty of conscience mean anything, it must surely mean perfect freedom
of