moment more opportune for the restoration of liberty than this, in which I have the honour to address you.

• England now smarts under the lesson of this American war; the doctrine of Imperial legislature she feels to be pernicious; the revenues and monopolies annexed to it, she has found to be untenable; she has lost the power to enforce it; her enemies are a host pouring upon her from all quarters of the earth; her armies are dispersed; the sea is not hers; she has no minister, no ally, no admiral; none in whom she long confides, and no general whom she has not disgraced. The balance of her fate is in the hands of Ireland. You are not only her last connexion; you are the only nation in Europe that is not her enemy. Besides, there does, of late, a certain damp and spurious supineness overcast her arms and councils, miraculous as that vigour which has lately inspirited yours;-for with you, every thing is directly the reverse. Never was there a parliament in Ireland so possessed of the confidence of the country; you are the greatest political assembly now sitting in the world; you are at the head of an immense army; nor do we only possess an unconquerable force, but a certain unquenchable public fire, which has touched all ranks of men, like a visitation.

Turn to the growth and spring of your country, and behold and admire it. Where do you find a nation who, upon whatever concerns the rights of mankind, expresses herself with more truth or force, perspicuity or justice? Not the set phrase of scholastic men, not the tame unreality of court addresses, but the genuine speech of liberty, and the unsophisticated oratory of a free nation.

See her military ardour, expressed not only in 40,000 men, conducted by instinct, as they were raised by inspiration, but manifested in the zeal and promptitude of every young member of the growing community. Let corruption tremble. Let the enemy foreign or domestic tremble. But let the friends of liberty rejoice at these means of safety and this hour of redemption. Yes. There does exist an enlightened sense of rights, a young appetite for freedom, a solid strength and a rapid fire, which not only put a declaration of right within your power, but put it out of your power to decline one. Eighteen counties are at your bar: they stand there with the compact of Henry, with the charter of John, and with all the passions of the people.

I read Lord North's proposition. I wish to be satisfied, but I am controlled by a paper, I will not call it a law;-it is the sixth of George the 1st. (The act was read.) I ask the gentlemen of the long robe,-Is this the law? I ask them whether it is not practice? I appeal to the judges of the land, whether they are not in the course of declaring that the Parliament of Great Britain, naming Ireland, binds her? I appeal to the magistrates of justice, whether they do not, from time to time, execute certain acts of the British Parliament? I appeal to the House, whether a country so circumstanced is free? Where is the freedom of trade? Where is the security of property? Where is the liberty of the people? I here, in this Declaratory Act, see my country proclaimed a slave! I see the judges of the realm, the oracles of law, borne down

by an unauthorised foreign power,-the authority of the British Parliament against the law! I see the magistrates prostrate, and Parliament silent. I therefore say with the voice of 3,000,000 of people, that notwithstanding the export of sugar, beetle-wood, and panellas, and the export of woollens and kerseys, nothing is safe, satisfactory, or honourable, nothing except a declaration of right. What are you, with 3,000,000 of men at your back, with charters in one hand and arms in another, afraid to say you are a free people? Are the cities and the instructing counties who have breathed a spirit that would have done honour to old Rome, when Rome did honour to mankind, are they to be free by connivance? Are the military associations, those bodies whose origin, progress and deportment have transcended, equalled at least, any thing in modern or ancient story,-are they to be free by connivance? What man will settle among you? Where is the use of the Naturalization bill? Who will leave a land of liberty and a settled government for a kingdom controlled by the Parliament of another country, whose liberty is a thing by stealth, whose trade a thing by permission, whose judges deny her charters,-where the chance of freedom depends upon the hope, that the jury shall despise the judge stating a British act, or a rabble stop the magistrate who executes it, rescue your abdicated privilege, and save the constitution by trampling on the government, by anarchy and confusion?'

These are ardentia verba. Towards his peroration, the Orator is still more powerful.

There is no policy left for Great Britain but to cherish the remains of her empire, and do justice to a country who is determined to do justice to herself, certain that she gives nothing equal to what she received from us when we gave her Ireland.

With regard to this country, England must resort to the free principles of government, and forget that legislative power which she has exercised to do mischief to herself. She must go back to freedom, which, as it is the foundation of her constitution, so it is the main pillar of her empire. It is not merely the connexion of the crown, it is a constitutional annexation, an alliance of liberty, which is the true meaning and mystery of the sisterhood, and will make both countries one arm and one soul, replenishing from time to time in their immortal connexion, the vital spirit of law and liberty from the lamp of each other's light. Thus combined by the ties of common interest, equal trade and equal liberty, the constitution of both countries may become immortal, a new and milder empire may arise from the errors of the old, and the British nation assume once more her natural station, the head of mankind.

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 weakness of the times; the tyranny of one side, the feebleness of the other, the law of neither. We will not be bound by them; or rather, in the

words of the Declaration of Right, "No doing judgement, proceed< ing, or any wise to the contrary shall be brought into precedent or example." Do not then tolerate a power-the power of the British Parliament over this land-which has no foundation in utility, or necessity, 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 it to have a duration in your mind.

Do not tolerate that power which blasted you for a century; that power which shattered your loom, banished your manufactures, dishonoured your peerage, and stopped the growth of your people; do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woollen or an import of sugar, and permit that power which has thus withered the land, to remain in your country, and have existence in your pusillanimity.

Do not suffer the arrogance of England to imagine a surviving hope in the fears of Ireland; 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 apology, you can palliate such a commission to your hearts, still less to your children, who will sting you with their curses in your grave for having interposed between them and their Maker, 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 history, your age of thraldom and poverty, your sudden resurrection, commercial redress, and miraculous armament, shall the historian stop at liberty, and observe, -that here the principal men among us fell into mimic trances of gratitude,-they were awed by a weak ministry, and bribed by an empty treasury, and when liberty was within their grasp, and the temple opening her folding-doors, and the arms of the people clanged, and the zeal of the nation urged and encouraged them on, that they fell down, and were prostituted at the threshold?

I might, as a constituent, come to your bar, and demand my liberty. I do call upon you, by the laws of the land and their violation, by the instruction of eighteen counties, by the arms, inspiration, and providence of the present moment, tell us the rule by which we shall go-assert the law of Ireland,-declare the liberty of the land.

'I will not be answered by a public lie in the shape of an amendment; neither, speaking for the subject's freedom, am I to hear of faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe, in this our Island, in common with my fellow-subjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be the ambition to break your chain, and contemplate your glory. I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking to his rags: he may be naked, he shall not be in iron. And I do see the time is at hand, the spirit is gone forth, the declarationis planted and though great men should apostatize, yet the cause will live; and though the public speaker should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the organ which conveyed it; and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him.

I shall move you, That the King's most excellent Majesty, and

he Lords and Commons of Ireland, are the only power competent to make laws to bind Ireland.'

It was an Herculean labour that the great Iris hpatriots of that day had undertaken. They proceeded in their enterprise with temper, but with firmness. While Mr. Grattan was attacking the supremacy of the British parliament, Mr. Flood and Mr. Yelverton (afterwards Lord Avonmore) selected the law of Poynings; Mr. Gervase Bushe the Perpetual Mutiny Bill; Mr. Gardiner and Sir Hercules Langrishe, the Penal Code. It was at Charlemont-house that the plans of this arduous campaign were laid.

In the mean time, a singular revolution was at hand, and various causes contributed to urge it on. The losses of Great Britain in America, and the irresolution and weakness of Lord North's administration, were greatly instrumental to this object. But it is to the volunteers, that Ireland owes the revolution of 1782. They had augmented to nearly 80,000 men. At the celebrated meeting held at Dungannon, they passed the following momentous resolutions:

That a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, is unconstitutional and a grievance.

That the powers exercised by the Privy Council of both kingdoms under colour of the law of Poynings, are unconstitutional and illegal.

That a mutiny bill not limited in point of duration from session to session, is unconstitutional and a grievance.'

Lord North's government was now dissolved, the Fox party appointed to succeed it, and the Duke of Portland sent over to Ireland. Upon an address being moved as usual to the Lord Lieutenant, Mr. Grattan moved by way of amendment, a Declaration of Right to his Majesty, which was carried unanimously.

The exordium of his speech on that occasion, is solemn and striking. It is not, indeed, secure from a minor criticism as to the antithetical abruptness of its sentences; but who can stop to take petty exceptions to a rapid and impetuous piece of eloquence, pronounced on one of the most interesting subjects that affect the dignity or the happiness of man?

'I am now to address a free people: ages have passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appelJation.

'I have spoken on the subject of your liberty so often, that I have nothing to add, and have only to admire by what heaven-directed steps

you have proceeded until the whole faculty of the nation is braced up lo the act of her own deliverance.

'I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! Your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation. In that new character I hail her, and bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto perpetua !

'She is no longer a wretched colony, returning thanks to her governor for his rapine, and to her king for his oppression; nor is she now a squabbling, fretful sectary, perplexing her little wits, and firing her furious statutes with bigotry, sophistry, disabilities, and death, to transmit to posterity insignificance and war.

'Look to the rest of Europe, and contemplate yourself, and be satisfied. Holland lives on the memory of past achievements; Sweden has lost her liberty; England has sullied her great name by an attempt to enslave her colonies. You are the only people,-you, of the nations in Europe, are now the only people who excite admiration; and in your present conduct, you not only exceed the present generation, but you equal the past. I am not afraid to turn back, and look antiquity in the face. The revolution,—that great event, whether you call it ancient or modern I know not,-was tarnished with bigotry. The great deliverer, (for such I must ever call the Prince of Nassau,) was blemished with oppression: he assented to, he was forced to assent to acts which deprived the Catholics of religious, and all the Irish of civil and commercial rights, though the Irish were the only subjects in these islands, who had fought in his defence. You, with difficulties innumerable, with dangers not a few, have done what your ancestors wished, but could not accomplish ; you have moulded the jarring elements of your country into a nation, and have rivalled those great and ancient commonwealths whom you were taught to admire, and among whom you are now to be recorded.. In this proceeding, you had not the advantages which were common to other great countries, no monuments, no trophies, none of those outward and visible signs of greatness, such as connect the ambition of the age which is coming on with that which is going off, and form the descent and concatenation of glory. No, you have not had any great act recorded in all your misfortunes, nor one public tomb, to assemble the crowd and speak to the living the language of integrity and freedom.

"Your historians did not supply the want of monuments; on the contrary, these narrators of your misfortunes, who should have felt for your wrongs, and have punished your oppressors with oppression's natural scourge, the moral indignation of history, compromised with public villany, and trembled. They described your violence, they suppressed your provocations, and wrote in the chain that entrammelled their country. I am come to break that chain, and I congratulate my country, who, without any advantages, going out as it were with nothing but a stone and a sling, and what oppression could not take away, the favour of heaven, accomplished her own redemption, and left you nothing to add, and every thing to admire.'

We wish that no record existed of the memorable dispute