Ireland, so is it dangerous to Great Britain. We are too near the British nation; we are too conversant with her history; we are too much fired by her example to be anything less than equals: anything less, we should be her bitterest enemies. An enemy to that power which smote us with her mace, and to that constitution from whose blessings we are excluded, to be ground, as we have been, by the British nation, bound by her Parliament, plundered by her Crown, threatened by her enemies, and insulted with her protection, while we return thanks for her condescension, in a system of meanness and misery, which has expired in our determination and in her magnanimity.

above me, has a Bill of Confirmation.' | thing less than liberty is inadequate to We do not come unprepared to Parliament. I am not come to shake property, but to confirm property, and to restore freedom. The nation begins to form-we are moulding into a people; freedom asserted, property secured, and the army, a mercenary band, likely to be dependent on your Parliament, restrained by law. Never was such a revolution accomplished in so short a time, and with such public tranquillity. In what situation would those men, who call themselves friends of constitution and government, have left you? They would have left you without a title (as they stole it) to your estates, without an assertion of your constitution, or a law for your army; and this state of private and public insecurity, this anarchy, raging in the kingdom for eighteen months, these mock-moderators would have had the presumption to call

peace.

That there are precedents against us I allow; acts of power I would call them, not precedents; and I answer the English pleading such precedents, as they answered their kings when they urged precedents against the liberty of England. Such things are the tyranny of one side, the weakness of the other, and the law of neither. We will not be bound by them; or rather, in the words of the Declaration of Right, no doing, judgment, or proceeding to the contrary, shall be brought into precedent or example. Do not then tolerate a power, the power of the British Government, over this land, which has no foundation in necessity, or utility, or empire, or the laws of England, or the laws of Ireland, or the laws of nature, or the laws of God. Do not suffer that power which banished your manufactures, dishonored your peerage, and stopped the growth of your people. Do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woollens, or an import of sugar, and suffer that power which has thus withered the land to have existence in your pusillanimity. Do not send the people to their own resolves for liberty, passing by the tribunals of justice, and the high court of Parliament; neither imagine that, by any formation of apol

The king has no other title to his crown than that which you have to your liberty. Both are founded, the throne and your freedom, upon the right vested in the subject to resist by arms, notwithstanding their oaths of allegiance, any authority attempting to impose acts of power as laws; whether that authority be one man or a host, the second James, or the British Parliament, every argument for the House of Hanover is equally an argument for the liberties of Ireland. The Act of Settlement is an Act of rebellion, or the sixth of George I. an Act of usurpation. I do not refer to doubtful history, but to living record, to common charters, to the interpretation England has put on those charters (an interpretation made, not by words only, but crowned by arms), to the revolution she has formed upon them, to the king she has established, and, above all, to the oath of allegiance solemnly plighted to the House of Stuart, and afterwards set aside in the instance of a grave and moral people, absolved by virtue of those very charters: and as any-ogy, you can palliate such a commission

2 An Act of the British Parliament settling the line

of succession to the British Crown on the descendants

to your hearts, still less to your children, who will sting you in your grave for interfering between them and their Maker, and robbing them of an immense occasion, and losing an opportunity which you did not create, and can never restore.

Hereafter, when these things shall be

of the Princess Sophia of Hanover, to the exclusion history, your age of thraldom, your sud

of the Stuarts.

den resurrection, commercial redress, and