moved by argument, unconciliated by submission, and contrary to an implied if not a positive agreement, in a determination to exclude from their highly-valued and vaunted privileges a large portion of their fellow-subjects, while it excites astonishment, must excite at the same time a desire to examine into the causes or motives by which they are actuated: for with such a people, the causes surely should not be trivial, which induce them so determinately to refuse the natural claims of the Irish Catholics, and to treat so numerous and respectable a body as slaves unworthy of confidence, and whom it would not be safe to trust with liberty.

Before, however, we enquire why these claims are refused, it is necessary to state their nature; and to take a short view of the origin and present state of those legal restrictions and disabilities from which the Irish Catholics claim to be emancipated; for, upon this subject, a most wonderful ignorance prevails amongst those who are most clamorous against the emancipation of their Catholic fellow-subjects; and the political declaimers and alarmist pamphle

teers, who have come forward for their instruction, are equally uninformed.

Ever since the English first obtained a footing in Ireland, they seem to have considered the natives as slaves, and have uniformly treated them with tyranny and contempt; without even thinking it worth while to disguise their sentiments. We will trace their oppression from its commencement under Henry the Second.

The celebrated conquest of Ireland, by this monarch, extended only to a few counties of Leinster; the greatest part of the kingdom still remained, as he found it, under the dominion of its native princes. The limit which divided the possessions of the English settler from those of the native Irish was called the pale; and the expressions of inhabitants within the pale, and without the pale, were the denominations by which the two nations were distinguished. The border, as may be well imagined, was the constant scene of the most bloody and savage warfare; which sometimes had an object, more frequently none; but the common subject of dispute was cows. The

Irish, over whom the sovereigns of England affected a sort of nominal dominion, continued to be governed by their own laws: so little indeed were they regarded by the laws of their invaders, that it was as lawful for the English settlers to kill an Irishman, as it was to destroy a badger or a fox: and the instances recorded among the Pleas of the Crown, still preserved in Dublin Castle,* are innumerable, where a man accused of murder, has pleaded that the deceased was an Irishman, and that therefore he had a right to kill him; and upon proof of this allegation, acquittal followed of course.

Though, when the English appeared on the borders in any considerable force, the Irish chieftains, to avert from their subjects the miseries of invasion, would do exterior homage to the English Crown; Ireland remained unsubdued till the rebellion, which took place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

For four hundred years before that period, the two nations had been almost constantly at war; and,

* See Sir John Davies's Discovery of the True Causes why Ire and was never entirely subdued.

as a natural consequence, a deep and irreconcileable hatred existed between the people within and without the pale. At the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the Irish were certainly the least civilized people

* There was not a house of brick or stone among the Irish down to the reign of Henry VII. not even a garden or orchard, or well-fenced or improved field, neither village or town, or in any respect the least provision for posterity; and though it is scarcely credible, that in a climate like that of Ireland, and at a period so far advanced in civilization as the end of Elizabeth's reign, the greater part of the native Irish should go naked, yet the testimony of an eye-witness, FYNES MORYSON, leaves no doubt on the subject. "In the remote parts," he says, "where the English laws and manners are unknown, the very chief of the Irish, as well men as women, go naked in the winter time, only having their privy parts covered with a rag of linen, and their bodies with a loose mantle. This I speak of my own experience; yet remember that a Bohemian Baron, coming out of Scotland to us by the north parts of the wild Irish, told me in great earnestness, that he, coming to the house of O'Kane, a great lord amongst them, was met at the door by sixteen women all naked, excepting their loose mantles, whereof eight or ten were very fair; with which strange sight his eyes being dazzled, they led him into the house, and then sitting down by the fire with crossed legs, like tailors, and so low as could not but offend chaste eyes, desired him to sit down with them. Soon after, O'Kane, the lord of the country, came in all naked,

in Europe; more alive, therefore, to a sense of in jury and oppression, and though unable to contend against a disciplined foe, their minds would remain unsubdued after defeat, they would brood over the memory of their wrongs for centuries to come, and break forth into arms at every period when they were particularly exasperated by oppression, or invited by opportunity. "If the Protestant religion," (to use the words of an animated writer* on this sub

except a loose mantle and shoes, which he put off as soon as he came in; and entertaining the baron after his best manner in the Latin tongue, desired him to put off his apparel, which he thought to be a burden to him, and to sit naked.

"To conclude, men and women at night, going to sleep, lie thus naked in a round circle about the fire, with their feet towards it. They fold their heads and their upper parts in woollen mantles, first steeped in water to keep them warm; for they say, that woollen cloth, wetted, preserves heat, (as linen wetted, preserves cold) when the smoke of their bodies has warmed the woollen cloth."

* See Review of Parnell's Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics; Edinburgh Review, July, 1807. See also the very able and luminous Review of Pamphlets on the Catholic Question Edin. Review, Oct. 1807, from which many interesting particulars, contained in this account, are extracted.