facts, which I have now submitted to the English
nation, as demonstrative that the Irish administration were themselves
the authors of those enormities which they have since made a pretext for
introducing fire and sword through the country--if this statement, I
say, be true, and I defy any part of it to be disproved, their guilt and
the emptiness of the pretences by which they have endeavoured to screen
it, are incontrovertible:

What was the next measure of administration? The Insurrection Act. The
outrages which commenced in Armagh, and had been but too successfully,
though faintly, imitated in several parts of the country, administration
now affected to consider as incurable by any of the ordinary powers with
which the law invested the executive authority. A law was therefore
propounded and adopted, by which any district which the magistrates of
it might think proper to declare in a state of disturbance, or in
immediate danger of becoming so, (phrases so vague that it required but
little artifice to make them applicable at that time to any county in
the kingdom,) was put into such a state of regimen, that any individual
magistrate might on his own authority, without trial or proof, seize the
person of any inhabitant and send him to serve on board his Majesty's
fleet--_i. e._ transport him for life.

In such districts the privileges of the constitution with respect to
liberty, and I may add, life, were completely suspended; for whether
under pretended authority derived from this act, or from the
superabundant zeal of the military protectors of the public peace, who
were employed to assist in the execution of it, numbers fell, either by
being shot at their own doors, or by the newly-invented process of
strangulation, adopted to procure confession of crimes which perhaps had
never been committed, or the accusation of others, whose innocence might
have made it impossible to convict them by other evidence.

Without entering into a more minute detail of the disgusting enormities
or the sufferings to which this measure gave birth, I may safely refer
it to the judgement of men accustomed to enjoy the uninterrupted
blessings of British law and liberty, whether the infliction of this
measure on the people of Ireland was not of itself enough to aggravate
feelings already irritated into discontent the most alarming. I do not
mean surely to justify assassination or treason, but I appeal to men who
have the feelings of freemen,