ave been
adopted but for one purpose--to raise on the broad basis of CORRUPT
INFLUENCE a system of government, which, under the form of the British
constitution, should stand independent of, and in opposition to, the
sense of the nation. I rest this opinion on two grounds--The one is,
because each successive measure taken up by administration to counteract
the wishes of the people, carried in it features of despotism, which in
a free country the necessity of the case could not call for. Every bill
of pains and penalties to which they resorted involved and asserted a
general and permanent principle, or gave the Executive a general and
extraordinary power, inconsistent with the spirit of the constitution,
though the occasions which gave rise to those measures were but partial
or transient. I refer for instances to the Convention Act, the
Insurrection Act, the Gunpowder Act, and the Press Bill, a measure
which, in my enumeration of the violent steps taken by the Irish
government, escaped me, though perhaps it is, of all the dreadful
groupe, the most prominent and most fatal to liberty and the
constitution.--The other reason on which my opinion rests is, because
administration have persevered in that system without making any one
effort to allay discontent or satisfy the moderate and loyal part of the
community by the concession of any of those measures on which the heart
of the nation was fixed--because they have gone on in opposition to the
sense of the best men in the empire to force the people of Ireland, or
the discontented part of it, into open and avowed rebellion, rather than
try any means to prevent that catastrophe by conciliating
measures--because this intention was avowed and gloried in[2]--and,
finally, because from the outset of their career they have resorted to
military coercion in every case where they could find, or create, the
slightest pretence for the use of that dreadful engine.

The flame which by these means has been kindled in Ireland can be
extinguished but in one of two ways--either the rebels aided by the
power of France will succeed in wresting Ireland from the British
connection, or the military force with which the Irish government is
entrusted will stifle in blood the discontents of the country. Of the
first there is happily no danger. The numbers of the insurgents is much
too small to endanger the connection, and that moderate and loyal party,
which administration have hitherto treated with