catholics of Ireland from seats in the legislature, by imposing on them the necessity of taking those oaths which amounted to a renunciation of their religion. King William, of immortal memory, did all this; yet the corporations and the aldermen of Ireland will wonder that the Irish catholic should be insulted by the annual celebration of his memory.

which its distinguished author has styled, "A statement of the penal laws which aggrieve the catholics of Ireland." Were we in want of a measure of the value of this performance, we should immediately find it in the efforts of the enemies of public liberty to diminish its effects by the combined struggles of power, corruption, and sophistry. It would indeed be a work of supererogation to panegyrize a performance which the splendid eloquence of Bushe has already immortalized. Extorting praises from its enemies, what must be the admiration of its friends? What must be the strength of that arm under which the whole embattled host of the British government in Ireland is obliged to crouch? What must be the strength of that reasoning which makes even intolerance tremble? and when, in order to be heard with temper, before no very friendly tribunal, the prosecutor is obliged to acknowledge the great pretensions of the man whose book he would endeavor to stigmatize? Ireland smiles at all this theatrical tumbling in the court: she admires the brilliancy of those powers which dazzle, even on the side of falsehood, but retires from the exhibition with contempt for the judgment which could waste its time in an idle struggle with reason, justice and truth. Public fame has attributed to counsellor Scully, a distinguished member of the catholic board, the execution of this most useful and necessary work to his country. Malignity would not be content unless the wreath, which Ireland would weave round the brow of its author, was rendered doubly precious by its calumny. His enemies have exhausted their fancy and their folly. Sophistry lies wearied with its unprofitable struggles; and the able expositor of the indignities under which his country suffers in the beginning of the nineteenth century, is enthroned on the ruins of his enemies. This book, of course, is sought for by every mind: it is to be found in every library; and promises, by the clearness and candor of its reasoning, to be the leading light to our legislators in their progress to the temple of justice. We have thus gratified our feelings in bearing our homage to the labors of our celebrated countryman. We hope that into whatever hands this compendium may fall, the observations we have made will induce them to read a work, which should be admired by the friends, because it has been persecuted by the enemies of Irish liberty.

Having said so much of the author, and of the great value of the pro duction, we shall now take from his pages that passage which induced us to call the reader's attention to him. Speaking of the injuries which must flow to the catholic body, by their exclusion from the legislature, the author of the "Statement" makes the following unanswerable observations:

"On the other hand, were catholics eligible to seats in the legislature; were there only ten catholics in the upper house, and twenty in the lower house, (which is a profitable estimate for the first ten years) how many mischiefs and errors might be avoided, how many useful projects framed

The " good queen Anne" endeavoured to exceed his majesty in her affection for her Irish subjects. She therefore commenced her administration of Ireland, with a perfidious violation of every law, divine and human. Having had the unprincipled courage to break the solemn obligations into which the English nation had entered with Ireland, when the latter agreed to lay down her arms at Limerick, the English government could with less difficulty proceed to the commission of every outrage which its avarice, or its spirit of despotism, might chance to suggest. Queen Anne introduced her ferocious system of government in Ireland, by an act which went to expel the inhabitants of Ireland from the lands of their fathers. She enacted that no catholic should have the power of purchasing any part of the forfeited lands; and that all leases which might have been made of such lands, shall be annulled, except those leases which might have been made to the poor cottagers of two acres; thus giving to the Irish such privileges as might best secure their vassalage to their taskmasters. "A law so barbarous, "

says Mr.

and accomplished. No protestant member, however upright and enlightened, can be expected by the catholics to be constantly prepared to protect their property from unequal impost in parliament, their rights from aggression, their fame from calumny, or their religion from gross misrepresentation. Catholic members, and they alone, would prove competent to those tasks. A member of this description, duly qualified, speaking upon the affairs, complaints and interests of his own community, could readily falsify the fabricated tale, refute the sophistical objection, unravel the apparent difficulty, state the true extent of what is desired, what is practicable. Such a catholic, actually knowing the condition of his fellow-sufferers, could put down a calumny in the instant of its utterance, and this not merely by contradicting, but by referring with promp❤ titude to existing documents, facts, and authorities; by quoting time, place, and circumstance, and bringing within the immediate view of the house and the public, the necessary materials of refutation."

6

"Finally, " says this enlightened writer," the statesman may truly observe of this exclusion of the catholics from both houses of the legislature, • Continue this exclusion of the catholics, and the removal of all the other grievances will be of little value, and of no permanent security to the catholics, or to the empire. Remove the exclusion, and other griev ances cannot long survive.""

Such, no doubt, is the importance of a seat in the legislative assembly; and king William, "of immortal memory," was so sensible of this, that he commenced his war against the Irish catholic by plundering him of his great and paramount privilege.

O'Connor "has no parallel in the records of nations;" yet the genius of the "good queen Anne" could surpass the barbarity, as we shall see hereafter. No lapse of time could purge the catholic of the hideous crime of fidelity to his religion, and attachment to his country. Never could he have the power, by the honorable labors of industry, of recovering those lands which were forfeited by the intemperate spirit of his fathers. He should consent to abandon every principle of honor and morality, before he could be qualified to be received into the bosom of the glorious constitution. Such an act might have for some time satisfied the craving appetite of rapacity; but so long as the victim had life, so long had the oppressor a propensity to indulge in cruelty. The act, therefore, which in its vicious perfection seems to reach the very summit of monopolizing malignity, is the act "for preventing the further growth of popery," by which the presbyterian and the catholic were equally levelled to the ground; in which the advocates of the church took their merciless vengeance on their old republican persecutors, whose industry and genius were then raising the north of Ireland into wealth, numbers and consequence. This wealth might have circulated among the catholics of the west and the south; and the spirit of political liberty, which ever found an asylum in the bosom of the presbyterian, might have communicated its contagion to the almost extinguished embers of catholic patriotism. The bill abovementioned, so celebrated for its infamy, went to the total expulsion of the catholics from any right or property in land. It disabled them from purchasing either lands o tenements, or taking by inheritance, devise or gift, any lands in the hands of protestants; making all estates which they might then hold, descendable by gavelkind, except in case of the conformity of the eldest son; rendering the father a mere tenant for life, depriving him of the power of alienating, mortgaging or encumbering, even for the support or the advancement of younger chil

dren, except under the controul and discretion of the chancellor." Had the "good queen Anne" and her Irish monopolists passed an act, which would have banished the entire catholic population of Ireland to some foreign though hospitable country, humanity might have had some consolation on which it might have reposed. But this would not have been the complete and finished work of despotism, which the advocates of the free constitution of England so fondly meditated in Ireland. The catholic slave would no longer have ministered to the pastime of his taskmaster; the torture would have been removed and the groans of a suffering though unoffending people, would have no longer soothed their tyrants to the sweet sleep of peace and security. The catholic historians have echoed the hypocrisy of protestant writers, in praising the loyalty of the Irish nation, while this work of legal slaughter was carrying on. Far be it from us to praise that submission which the tyrant and the hypocrite will ever dignify with the name of loyalty. We would have felt pleasure in recording the struggle of a brave nation with their cowardly and unprincipled tyrants, and have been consoled by the appeals of our oppressed country to the venerated shades of her O'Moore and O'Neil. What Englishman, who has reflected on the struggles of his ancestors, and who is now reaping the harvest which was sowed by the hand of freedom, must not have rejoiced if Ireland had risen like a giant and shook off the contemptible tyranny which thus dared to oppress her? We have said that this grand desolating act for "preventing the further growth of popery," was alike aimed at the pres. byterian as the catholic. It was not so much the offspring of sectarian bigotry as national jealousy and tyranny: it. was not so much the act of a protestant as the act of a nation; it was not to put down the catholics; it was to extinguish our country, and render, in future, the protestants, catholics, and presbyterians of Ireland, the humble vassals, the hewers of wood and drawers of water to their Brr

enlightened and liberal sister country. For this purpose the English tory government introduced a provision into the act, by which all persons in Ireland were rendered incapable of any employment under the crown, or of being magistrates in any city, who should not, agreeably to the test act, receive the sacrament according to the usage of the church of Ireland, thus calling upon the presbyterian to renounce his religion if he wished to enjoy the protection or the privileges of the constitution.

The resistance made by the Irish presbyterian to the introduction of such a provision into an act which he had conceived was solely levelled against his catholic countrymen, should have been to the future presbyterian of Ireland a fruitful source of instruction on the folly as well as the malignity of religious persecution. The anx

iety of the English government to depress the catholic, should have demonstrated to the reflecting presbyterian, that catholic subjugation must necessarily lead to the subjugation of their common country; and that the object of England could have been nothing less than the complete conquest of Irish freedom. The reader will observe how slow is the progress of that tolerating spirit, which in his own days distinguishes the presbyterians; how little like Irishmen, and how much like a sect, they gave their opposition to this bold effort of the English government against their civil and religious liberties. In their remonstrance to parliament they pass by their catholic sufferer, and complain, in the piteous tone of disappointment, that they, the presbyterians, who had distinguished themselves so long as the persecutors of the catholic religion, should be now assailed by that hand which should have been the first to protect them.

The philospher smiles at the little contracted ground of defence which is here taken, and warmly hails the arrival of that day which exhibits the Irish presbyterian maintaining his own rights by his enlightened and liberal advocacy of the rights of his catholic countryman. In