who dared to complain of his
sufferings or his privations, or assumed the courage to exercise the
humble privilege of petitioning for redress? If the saucy hirelings of a
foreign Cabinet should publicly avow contempt for the men who uphold the
strength and consequence of the state by useful industry, and tell the
merchant and manufacturer that it was not for such fellows to deal in
politics, to seek for rights, or talk of constitution--would not the
spirit of the nation rise against their insolence, and make them feel
how much more valuable _he_ is who promotes the comfort and welfare of
society by commerce or by labour, than _he_ who lives upon the spoil of
the community in something _worse_ than idleness?

It was this arrogance in the Castle servants, the result of their
conscious strength in corruption, that scouted with contempt and insult,
out of the Irish House of Commons in 1795, the petition of three
millions of Catholics, fully and impartially represented. Was not this
an aggression of administration against the people? And yet the
partisans of that administration--nay, the first mover in it, has had
the confidence to assert, that the discontents and tumults of the people
_preceded_ the measures of which they complain. Englishmen will
determine, whether the Irish nation, consisting principally of
Catholics, had or had not reason to be disgusted with the administration
of the government under which they lived, when by the influence of that
administration not only their wishes were not consulted, not only their
general sense disregarded, but even their supplications spurned without
a hearing from that body which professed to be, and which ought to be,
their representatives.

If it be granted that such conduct in the popular representation of a
nation was calculated to excite discontent and destroy confidence, what
followed that transaction must have had a much more powerful tendency to
alienate the affection of the people, and produce those direful
consequences which are now boldly said to have arisen unprovoked. When
the Irish Catholics perceived, from the manner in which their petition
for the elective franchise was treated, that in the Irish House of
Commons they were not to look for friends, they resorted to the Throne.
The supplications which had met only with contumely when addressed to
the Irish Commons, was received with favour by a British King, acting
with the advice of a British Cabinet. In the next s