the last ten years encrease in interest, as they advance to

e to a crisis.

T

This anomalous state of the constitution has bereft your Royal Highness of the power of indulging your innate princely benevolence, and disabled you to give effect to the attributes of Royal virtue. An attempt to procure access to the executive (even under unconstitutional restrictions) over the heads of its responsible advisers might not be per fectly constitutional. And repeated experience has convinced me of the anxiety of its present advisers to keep from your Royal Highness the knowledge of those facts, which it is the prime object of this history to impart. With humble confidence I assume, that the spirit of your Royal Highness's former permission extends its benign influence to this continuation of my former works: Convinced then, that your Royal

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Highness still feels the deepest interest for the Irish people, viewing their warm attachment to your Royal Highness as an unequivocal test of their earnestness in the cause of the British Empire, believing, that without their cordial co-operation that Empire cannot stand, and reluctantly yielding to circumstantial evidence, that there long has existed, and still does exist a systematic confederacy, alarming, as it is disavowed and disguised, which puts your Royal Highness's native rights to hazard, and the State in danger, in anticipated confidence of your Royal Highness's continued permission I humbly dedicate to your Royal Highness these earnest efforts to unravel the confederacy by a faithful disclosure of the weak and wicked policy so long pursued in governing this valuable portion of the United Kingdom. Sympathetic justice to a high spirited and powerful population has suggested, an active anxiety for the interests of your

Royal Highness has encouraged, and the highest duty of a subject (my sworn allegiance) has summoned me to take in hand the arduous and ungracious, though transcendently necessary undertaking, to stem the destructive confluence of deception, falsehood, and corruption.

July 19, 1811.

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

THE Author was once upbraided for having volunteered his services in bringing before the public his Historical Review of State of Ireland.* He now presents himself before the public, no longer as a Volunteer, but as regularly enlisted, and fulfilling the indispensible obligations of his oath of engagement. It is some time since he swore without any evasion, equivocation or mental reservation, to defend King George the Third, to the utmost of his power, against all confpiracies

and

* Sir Richard Musgrave in his critique upon that work in the Anti-Jacobin Review, says of the author, p. 228. “Had " he been compelled at this critical period to write his Histo"rical Review, and had been impartial, whatever bad consequences might have followed, could not have been laid "to his cherge. But he was a volunteer, an eager volunteer.”

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