which formerly inflamed the furious factions, which had torn their Country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and abominable things, which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured, robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years after, to find some colour for justifying them in the eternal proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.

Let us come to a later period of those confiscations, with the memory of which the gentlemen, who triumph in the Acts of 1782, are so much delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in 1688, and the English Parliament again put up to sale the greatest part of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this rebellion; nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation. The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their feeble power. the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated Sovereign against a prince, whom the Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them. In generous minds,

Be

some

some small degree of compassion might be excited for an errour, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a Conqueror, quâdam specie et similitudine pacis, not without a mistaken appearance of duty, and for which the guilty have suffered by exile abroad, and slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best calculators compute, that Ireland lost 200,000 of her inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified (as sure I am it is), the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle, that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholicks must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a Prince, whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their Religion, or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect; and who, far from trespassing on their liberties and properties, secured both them and the independence of their Country in much the same manner, that we have seen the same things done at the period of 1782-I trust the last Revolution in Ireland.

That the Irish Parliament of King James did in some particulars, though feebly, imitate the rigour, which had been used towards the Irish, is true enough. Blamable enough they were for

what

what they had done, though under the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or counter-confiscations as long as I live. When they happen by necessity, I shall think the necessity lamentable and odious: I shall think, that any thing done under it ought not to pass into precedent, or to be adopted by choice, or to produce any of those shocking retaliations, which never suffer dissensions to subside. Least of all would I fix the transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodising it in tyrannick government. If it were permitted to argue with power, might one not ask these gentlemen, whether it would not be more natural, instead of wantonly mooting these questions concerning their property, as if it were an exercise in Law, to found it on the solid rock of prescription; the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title between man and man, that is known in municipal or in publick jurisprudence? a title, in which not arbitrary institutions, but the eternal order of things gives judgment; a title, which is not the creature, but the master, of positive Law; a title, which, though not fixed in its term, is rooted in its principle, in the law of nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property; for all property in soil will always be traced back to that source, and will rest there. The miserable Natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an hundred are tormented with

quite other cares, and are bowed down to labour for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding with antiquaries for titles of centuries ago to the estates of the great Lords and 'Squires, for whom they labour. But if they were thinking of the titles, which gentlemen labour to beat into their heads, where can they bottom their own claims but in a presumption and a proof, that these lands had at some time been possessed by their ancestors? These gentlemen, for they have Lawyers amongst them, know as well as I, that in England we have had always a prescription or limitation, as all nations have, against each other. The Crown was excepted; but that exception is destroyed, and we have lately established a sixty years' possession as against the Crown. All titles terminate in prescription; in which (differently from Time in the fabulous instances) the son devours the father, and the last prescription eats up all the former.

LETTER

ON THE AFFAIRS OF IRELAND,

Dear Sir,

IN

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1797*.

N the reduced state of body, and in the dejected state of mind, in which I find myself at this very advanced period of my life, it is a great consolation to me to know, that a cause I ever had so very; near my heart is taken up by a man of your activity and talents.

It is very true, that your late friend, my ever dear and honoured son, was in the highest degree solicitous about the final event of a business, which he also had pursued for a long time with infinite zeal, and no small degree of success. It was not above half an hour before he left me for ever, that he spoke with considerable earnestness on this very subject.. If I had needed any incentives to do my best for freeing the body of my country from the grievances, under which they labour, this alone would certainly call forth all my endeavours.

The person, who succeeded to the Government of Ireland about the time of that afflicting event, had been all along of my sentiments and your's upon this subject: and far from needing to be

* For some account of the Manuscript, from which this Letter is printed, see the Introductory Letter, p. 6.