o that proprietal justice and grant
that religious liberty for which the country had been struggling? How
check civil war--how sustain a war by the resources of a distracted
country? Yet all this the Irish parliament did, and more too; for they
established the principal parts of a code needful for the _permanent_
liberty and prosperity of Ireland.

Take up the list of acts passed in their session of seventy-two days
and run over them. They begin by recognising their lawful king who had
thrown himself among them. They pledge themselves to him against his
powerful foe. Knowing full well the struggle that was before them, and
that lukewarm and malcontent agents might ruin them, they tossed aside
those official claims, which in times of peace and safety should be
sacred.

But their next act deserves more notice. It must not be forgotten that
Molyneux's "Case of Ireland," which the parliaments of England and
Ireland first burnt, and ended by declaring and enacting as sound law,
was published in 1699, just ten years after this parliament of James's.
Doubtless the antique rights of the native Irish, the comparative
independence of the Pale, the arguments of Darcy, the memory of the
council of Kilkenny, might suggest to Molyneux those principles of
independence, which one of his cast of mind would hardly reach by
general reasoning. But why go so far back, and to so much less apt
precedents? Here, in the parliament of 1689, was a law made declaring
Ireland to be and to have always been a "distinct kingdom" from
England; "always governed by his majesty and his predecessors according
to the ancient customs, laws, and statutes thereof, and that the
parliament of Ireland, and that _alone_, could make laws to bind this
kingdom;" and expressly enacting and declaring that no law save such as
the Irish parliament might make should bind Ireland. And this act
prohibited all English jurisdiction in Ireland, and all appeals to the
English peers or to any other court out of Ireland. Is not this the
whole argument of Molyneux, the hope of Swift and Lucas, the attempt of
Flood, the achievement of Grattan and the Volunteers? Is not this an
epitome of the Protestant patriot attempts, from the Revolution to the
Dungannon Convention? Is not this the soul of '82? Surely, if it be, as
it is, just to track the stream of liberation back to Molyneux, we
should not stop there; but when we find that a parliament which sat
only ten years before his book