gredient of bitterness in the cup of misfortune. Every change was from bad to worse; so that the Irish patriot who sympathised with her fortunes, might have lamented that the sword of annihilation had left a subject on which her future tyrants could indulge their malice. A celebrated writer on the English constitution, speaking of the various revolutions which took place in England, has the following observations :

"If we peruse the history of England," says De Lolme, "we shall be peculiarly struck with one circumstance to be observed in it, and which distinguishes most advantageously the English government from all other free governments-I mean the manner in which revolutions and public commotions have always been terminated in England. If we read with some attention the history of other free states, we shall see the public dissentions that have taken place in them, have constantly been terminated by settlements, in which the interests only of a few were really provided for, while the grievances of the many were hardly, if ever, attended to. In England the very reverse has happened, and we find revolutions always to have been terminated by extensive and accurate provisions for securing the general liberty."

In Ireland we have hitherto found that revolutions terminated in the forging of new chains and the multiplication of new tortures. The liberty of England and the slavery of Ireland have invariably proceeded together; Ireland going down as England ascended. Posterity have justly concluded that the rights of

Irishmen and the prosperity of England cannot exist together a melancholy truth, which the events of the present day only contribute to confirm, and which is still left to the enlightened English government of future days to refute. The lights of history cannot be extinguished, nor her powerful voice silenced. The conclusions we have drawn are irresistible, and the idle violence which attempts to punish their publication only impresses those truths more deeply on the mind. The glories of William and of Anne-the victories of Marlborough, and the universal conquests of Chatham, have been the most disastrous epochs of Ireland. Never was the heart of our country so low as when England was the envy and the terror of her enemies. The sounds of English triumphs were to her the sounds of sorrow-the little tyrants who ruled her were inflamed with courage, and urged on with increased rancour-the unhappy catholics of Ireland, who always constituted the nation, were doomed to be again insulted and tortured with impunity-and the protestant parliaments of our country, as if their existence depended on their servility, will be seen sacrificing even their own properties, as well as those of their catholic countrymen, to the insatiable monoply of England-yet all those scenes were the offspring of that revolution in which Englishmen most justly triumph-a revolution which, De Lolme says, terminated by a series of public acts in which no interests but those of the people at large were considered and provided for. The series of public acts which the same revolution produced in Ireland,

were directed to sacrifice the peace, happiness and security of Irishmen to the establishment of a contemptible monopoly, which rendered them for seventy years the degraded slaves of a system that beggared and insulted them. The enlightened protestant of the present day, looks back with horror on that profligate folly which gratified the malignity of a foreign country, in the enactment of a system of legislation which puts into the shade the more humane, because less lingering despotism of the inquisition. He shudders at the recollection of that infatuated spirit of ascendancy which chained the hand of industry, barbarized the infant mind, broke up all the social feelings, bribed the child to betray his parent, and the perjured apostate to plunder the innocent and conscientious. The protestants of the present day hasten with one voice to cancel the odious record and to bury it in eternal oblivion. The English revolution of 1688, for the anniversary of which the bells of ascendancy ring the annual peal, was the consummation of Irish suffering-it should be therefore looked on by the honest Irishman, as a theory from which he might derive gratification in the contemplation, but as a practical curse, with which his unfortunate country was visited at the very moment she ought to have shared in its blessings. The protestant of the pre. sent day thus reasons; he adopts the language and the opinions of that great man, whose towering genius first contributed to dissipate the fog of reli. gious prejudice, and expose the miseries which it concealed, Cheerfully does he bow to the reason,

ing of the great Edmund Burke, when he thus describes the constitution of 1688, as practised in Ireland by the parliamentary task-masters.

"I cannot," says our great countryman, in his letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe," possibly confound in my mind all the things that were done at the revolution, with the principles of the revolution; as in most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the time, well or ill understood, from passion or from vengeance, which were not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most direct contradiction to them. I shall not think that the deprivation of some millions of all the rights of citizens, and all the interest in the constitution, in and to which they were born, was a thing conformable to the declared principles of the revolution. This I am sure is true, relatively to England (where the operation of these anti-principles comparatively were of little extent); and some of our late laws, in repealing acts made immediately after the revolution, admit that some things then done were not done in the true spirit of the revolution. But the revolution operated differently in England and Ireland, in many, and these essential particulars. Supposing the principles to be altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the application of these principles to very different objects, the whole spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed. In England it was the struggle of the great body of the people for the establishment of their liberties against the efforts of a very small faction, who would have

oppressed them. In Ireland it was the establishment of the power of the smaller number, at the expence of the civil liberties and properties of the whole. It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but a conquest; which is not to say a great deal in its favour.

"To insist upon every thing done in Ireland at the revolution, would be to insist on the severe and jealous policy of a conqueror in the crude settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent rule for its future government. This, no power, in any: country that I have ever heard of, has done or professed, except in Ireland, where it is done, and possibly by some people will be professed. Time has, by degrees, in all other places and periods, blended the conquered and the conquerors. So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English." Mr Burke then proceeds to trace to their true and proper source, the. causes of that infamous code of laws which was enacted during the reigns upon which we are now entering. To do justice to Mr Burke, the entire of his admirable letter should be copied into this compendium; but the limits of our work forbid so large a quotation. The following observations, however, are so good an introduction to the reign of that sovereign who first commenced the statute war against the catholics of Ireland, that we shall make no apology for requesting the reader's attention to their truth as well as to their philosophy.

"For a much longer period than that," says Mr

2