MY DEAR SIR, A SECOND LETTER TO SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE. IF I am not as early as I ought to be in my acknowledgments for your very kind letter, pray do me the justice to attribute my failure to its natural and but too real cause, a want of the most ordinary power of exertion, owing to the impressions made upon an old and infirm constitution by private misfortune and by public calamity. It is true, I make occasional efforts to rouse myself to something better but I soon relapse into that state of languor, which must be the habit of my body and understanding, to the end of my short and cheerless existence in this world. I am sincerely grateful for your kindness in connecting the interest you take in the sentiments of an old friend, with the able part you take in the service of your country. It is an instance, among many, of that happy temper, which has always given a character of amenity to your virtues, and a good-natured direction to your talents. Your speech on the catholic question I read with much satisfaction. It is solid; it is convincing; it is eloquent; and it ought, on the spot, to have produced that effect, which its reason, and that contained in the other excellent speeches on the same side of the question, cannot possibly fail (though with less pleasant consequences) to produce hereafter. What a sad thing it is, that the grand instructor, Time, has not yet been able to teach the grand lesson, of his own value; and that in every question of moral and political prudence, it is the choice of the moment which renders the measure serviceable or useless, noxious or salutary. In the catholic question I considered only one point. Was it, at the time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens? I have no dficulty in saying it was; and as little is saying, that the present concord of the citizens was worth buying, at a critical season, by granting a few capacities which probably no one man now living is likely to be served or hurt by. When any man tells you and me, that, if these places were left in the discretion of a protestant crown, and these memberships in the discretion of protestant electors, or pa trons, we should have a popish official system, and a popish representation, capable of over. turning the establishment, he only insults our understandings. When any man tells this to catholics, he insults their understandings, and he galls their feelings. It is not the question of the places and seats; it is the real hostile disposition, and the pretended fears, that leave stings in the minds of the people. I really thought, that in the total of the late circumstances, with regard to persons, to things, to principles, and to measures, was to be found a conjuncture favourable to the introduction, and to the perpetuation of a general harmony, producing a general strength, which to that hour Ireland was never so happy as to enjoy. My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that terrible disappointment, to the same patience in which I have been obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and hcnourable causes in which I have had some share; and which have given more of dignity, than of peace and advantage, to a long laborious life. Though, perhaps, a want of success might be urged as a reason for making me doubt of the justice of the part I have taken, yet, until I have other lights than one side of the debate has furnished me, I must see things, and feel them too, as I see and feel them. I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of protestant ascen dancy, as they affect Ireland; or of indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of jacobinism, as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. But it readily combines with the others, and flows from them. Whatever breeds discontent at this time, will produce that great master-mischief most infallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people, that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion, that their interest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained to jacobinism. Whatever tends to irritate the talents of a country, which have at all times, and at these particularly, a mighty influence on the public mind, is of infinite service to LETTER TO SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE. mat formidable cause. Unless where heaven I agree with you in your dislike of the discourses in Francis-street: but I like as little some of those in College-green. I am even ess pleased with the temper that predominated in the latter, as better things might have been expected in the regular family mansion of public discretion, than in a new and hasty assembly of unexperienced men, congregated under circumstances of no small irritation. After people have taken your tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not to be surprised if they fall into a passion, and talk, as men in a passion do, intemperately and idly. The worst of the matter is this: You are partly leading, partly driving into jacobinism, that description of your people, whose religious principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an invincible dyke against that inundation. This you have a thousand mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish. You make a sad story of the pope!-O seri studiorum!-It will not be difficult to get many called catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion. Never doubt it. You have succeeded in part; and you may succeed completely. But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter yourselves T 427 that they will piously look to the head of our make them forswear; and out of all reverence church in the place of that pope, whom you them. Perhaps you may succeed in the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine, to whom, you bully, and rail, and buffoon and usages of discipline, among the catholics. But what security have you, that, in the temper, and on the principles on which they have made this change, they will stop at the exact sticking places you have marked in your articles? You have no security for any thing, but that they will become, what are called Franco-Jacobins, and reject the whole together. No converts now will be made in a considerable number from one of our sects to Controversy moves in another direction. the other upon a really religious principle. baters in your majority, and their writers, have Next to religion, property is the great point given the jacobins all the assistance their of jacobin attack. Here many of the dehearts can wish. When the catholics desire places and seats, you tell them, that this is only a pretext, (though protestants might suppose it just possible for men to like good rits;) but that their real view is, to strip proplaces, and snug boroughs for their own meknowledge, till those jacobin lectures were opened in the house of commons, they never testants of their property. To my certain dreamt of any such thing; but now, the great professors may stimulate them to inquire (on property, and of all property. If you treat the new principles) into the foundation of that men as robbers, why robbers, sooner or later, they will become. for yours, which leans from its perpendicular, declamations, which has not, to your and to my certain knowledge, been taught by the jealous ascendants, sometimes by doctrine, sometimes by example, always by provocation. Remember the whole of 1781, and 1782-in parliament and out of parliament at this very day, and in the worst acts and designs, observe the tenour of the objections with which the College-green orators of the ascendancy reproached the catholics. You have observed, no doubt, how much they rely on the affair of Jackson. Is it not pleasant to hear catholics reproached for a supposed connection-with whom?-With protestant clergymen, with protestant gentlemen! With Mr. Jackson With Mr. Rowan, &c. &c.! But egomet mi egnosco. Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures, not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of papists. Indeed, all this will do perhaps well enough with detachments of dismounted cavalry, and fencibles from England. But let us not say to catholics, by way of argument, that they are to be kept in a degraded state, because some of them are no better than many of us protestants. The thing I most disliked in some of their speeches (those I mean of the catholics) was what is called the spirit of liberality, so much and so diligently taught by the ascendants, by which they are made to abandon their own particular interests, and to merge them in the general discontents of the country. It gave me no pleasure to hear of the dissolution of the committee. There were in it a majority, to my knowledge, of very sober, well-intentioned men; and there were none in it, but such who, if not continually goaded and irritated, might be made useful to the tranquillity of the country. It is right always to have a few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the many, both for the interests of the description and for the general interest. Excuse me, my dear friend, if I have a little tired your patience. You have brought this trouble on yourself, by your thinking of a man forgot, and who has no objection to be forgot, by the world. These things we discussed together four or five-and-thirty years ago. We were then, and at bottom, ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of the whole, and of every part of the penal system. You and I, and every body, must now and then ply and bend to the occasion, and take what can be got. But very sure I am, that whilst there remains in the law any principle whatever, which can furnish to certain politicians an excuse for raising an opinion of their own importance, as necessary to keep their fellow subjects in order, the obnoxious people will be fretted, harassed, insulted, provoked to discontent and disorder, and practically excluded from the partial advantages from which the letter of the law does not exclude them. Adieu! my dear sir, and believe me very MY DEAR SON, LETTER TO RICHARD BURKE, ESQ. WE are all again assembled in town, to finish the last, but the most laborious of the tasks which have been imposed upon me during my parliamentary service. We are as well as, at our time of life, we can expect to be. We have indeed some moments of anxiety about you. You are engaged in an undertaking similar in its principle to mine. You are engaged in the relief of an oppressed people. In that service you must necessarily excite the same sort of passions in those who have exercised, and who wish to continue that oppression, that I have had to struggle with this long labour. As your father has done, you must make enemies of many of the rich, of the proud, and of the powerful. I and you began in the same way. I must confess, that if our place was of our choice, I could wish it had been your lot to begin the career of your life with an endeavour to render some more moderate, and less invidious service to the public. But being engaged in a great and critical work, I have not the least hesitation about your having hitherto done your duty as becomes you. If I had not an assurance not to be shaken, from the character of your mind, I should be satisfied on that point, by the cry that is raised against you. If you had behaved, as they call it, discreetly, that is, faintly and treacherously, in the execution of your trust, you would have had for a while the good word of all sorts of men; even of many of those whose cause you had betrayed; and whilst your favour lasted, you might have coined that false reputation into a true and solid interest to yourself. This you are well apprized of; and you do not refuse to travel that beaten road from an ignorance, but from a contempt of the objects it leads to. When you choose an arduous and slippery path, God forbid that any weak feelings of my declining age, which calls for soothings and supports, and which can have none but from you, should make me wish that you should abandon what you are about, or should trifle with it. In this house we submit, though with troubled minds, to that order which has connected all great duties with toils and with perils, which has conducted the road to glory through the regions of obloquy and reproach, and which will never suffer the disparaging alliance of spurious, false, and fugitive praise, with genuine and permanent reputation. We know, that the power which has settled that order, and subjected you to it, by placing you in the situation you are in, is able to bring you out of it, with credit and with safety. His will be done. All must come right. You may open the way with pain, and under reproach. Others will pursue it with ease and with applause. I am sorry to find that pride and passion, and that sort of zeal for religion, which never shows any wonderful heat but when it afflicts and mortifies our neighbour, will not let the ruling description perceive that the privilege for which your clients contend, is very nearly as much for the benefit of those who refuse it, as those who ask it. I am not to examine into the charges that are daily made on the administration of Ireland. I am not qualified to say how much in them is cold truth, and how much rhetorical exaggeration. Allowing some foundation to the complaint, it is to no purpose that these people allege that their government is a job in its administration. I am sure it is a job in its constitution; nor is it possible a scheme of polity which, in total exclusion of the body of the community, confines (with little or no regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favoured citizens the rights which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the persons who administer in that government to prefer their own particular, but well understood private interest, to the false and ill calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong to. Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances. I have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force. by the native vigour of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and climate that it grows in. But, speaking of things in their ordinary course, in a country of monopoly there can be no patriotism. There may be a party spirit but public spirit there can be none. As to a spirit of liberty, still less can it exist, or any thing like it. A liberty made up of penalties! a liberty made of incapacities! a liberty made up of exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four-fifths, perhaps, of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes! Ir what does such liberty differ from the descrip tion of the most shocking kind of servitude? But it will be said, in that country some people are free-why this is the very descrip tion of despotism. Partial freedom is privi lege and prerogative, and not Liberty. Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle. It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It is the portion of the mass of the citizens; and not the haughty license of some potent individual, or some predominant faction." If any thing ought to be despotic in. country, it is its government; because there is no cause of constant operation to make its yoke unequal. But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by its very essence, lean upon the prostrate description. A constition formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor of freedom. It compels that power, which ought, and often would be, disposed equally to protect the subjects, to fail in its trust, to counteract its purposes, and to become no better than the instrument of the wrongs of a faction. Some degree of influence must exist in all governments. But a government which has no interest to please the body of the people, and can neither support them, nor with safety call for their support, nor is of power to sway the domineering faction, can only exist by corruption; and taught by that monopolizing party which usurps the title and qualities of the public, to consider the body of the people as out of the constitution, they will consider those who are in it in the light in which they choose to consider themselves. The whole relation of government and of freedom will be a battle or a traffic. This system, in its real nature, and under its proper appellations, is odious and unnatural, especially when a constitution is admitted, which not only, as all constitutions do profess, has a regard to the good of the multitude, but in its theory makes profession of their power also. But of late, this scheme of theirs has been new christened-honestum nomen imponitur vitio. A word has been lately struck in the mint of the castle of Dublin; thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or City-hall, where having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in parliament, and was carried back by the speaker of the house of commons in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence it came. The word is ascendancy: It is not absolutely new. But the sense in which I have hitherto seen it used, was to signify an influence obtained over the minds of some other person by love and reverence, or by superiour management and dexterity. It had, therefore, to this its promotion, no more than a moral, not a civil or political use. But I admit it is capable of being so applied; and if the lord mayor of Dublin, and the speaker of the Irish parliament, who recommend the preservation of the protestant ascendancy, mean to employ the word in that sense, that is, if they understand by it the preservation of the influence of that description of gentlemen over the catholics by means of an authority derived from their wis dom and virtue, and from an opinion they raise in that people of a pious regard and affection for their freedom and happiness, it is impossible not to commend their adoption of so apt a term into the family of politics. It may be truly said to enrich the language. Even if the lord mayor and speaker mean to insinuate that this influence is to be obtained and held by flattering their people, by managing them, by skilfully adapting themselves to the humours and passions of those whom they would govern, he must be a very untoward critic who would cavil even at this use of the word, though such cajoleries would perhaps be more prudently practised than professed. These are all meanings laudable, or at least tolerable. But when we look a little more narrowly, and compare it with the plan to which it owes its present technical application, I find it has strayed far from its original sense. It goes much further than the privilege allowed by Horace. It is more parcè detortum. This protestant ascendancy means nothing less than an influence obtained by virtue, by love, or even by artifice and seduction; full as little an influence derived from the means by which ministers have obtained an influence, which might be called, without straining, an ascendancy in public assemblies in England, that is, by a liberal distribution of places and pensions, and other graces of government. This last is wide indeed of the signification of the word. New ascendancy is the old mastership. It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set of people in Ireland, to consider themselves as the sole citizens in the commonwealth; and to keep a dominion over the rest by reducing them to absolute slavery, under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely among themselves. The poor word ascendancy, so soft and me lodious in its sound, so lenitive and emollient in its first usage, is now employed to cover to the world, the most rigid, and perhaps not the most wise, of all plans of policy. The word is large enough in its comprehension. I cannot conceive what mode of oppression in civil life. or what mode of religious persecution, may not come within the methods of preserving an ascendancy. In plain old English, as they apply it, it signifies pride and dominion on the one part of the relation, and on the other subserviency and contempt—and it signifies nothing else. The old words are as fit to be set to music as the new; but use has long since affixed to them their true signification, and they sound, as the other will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ears of mankind. This ascendancy, by being a protestant ascendancy, does not better it from the combination of a note or two more in this antiharmonic scale. If protestant ascendancy means the proscription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then protestant ascendancy is a bad thing; and it ought to have no existence. But there is a deeper evil. By the use that is so frequently made of the term, and the policy which is engrafted on it, the name protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men; for the patrons of this protestant |