What answer could we make to the Catholics of Ireland, if they were to rise, and, with one voice, demand their rights as citizens and as men? What reply justifiable to God and to our conscience? None. We prate and babble, and write books, and publish them, filled with sentiments of freedom, and abhorrence of tyranny, and lofty praises of the Rights of Man! Yet we are content to hold three millions of our fellow creatures and fellow subjects, in degradation and infamy and contempt, or, to sum up all in one word, in slavery!

On what chapter of the Rights of Man do we ground our title to liberty, in the moment that we are rivetting the fetters of the wretched Roman Catholics of Ireland? Shall they not say to us, "Are we not men, as ye are, stamped with the image of our Maker, walking erect, beholding the same light, breathing the same air as Protestants. Hath not a Catholic hands; hath not a Catholic eyes, dimensions, organs, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Protestant is? If ye prick us, do we not bleed? If ye tickle us, do we not laugh? If ye poison us, do we not die? And if ye injure us, shall we not revenge? Hath a Catholic the mark of the beast in his forehead, that he should wander over his native soil, like the accursed Cain, with his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him? God Almighty, in his just anger, visits the sins of the fathers, upon the children, not beyond the third or fourth generation, even of those that hate him; and will nothing short of our eternal slavery satisfy the unmitigable rage of Protestant oppression? How have we offended? The offence of our ancestors, was their property and their power; we have neither; they are long since sacrificed, and you are in undisputed possession of the spoil. Do not then grudge us existence, or that for which alone man should exist-liberty. Say not that we are unprepared; liberty prepares herself: Say not that we are ignorant, lest ye judge yourselves. Why are we so? Enough has been done and suffered by us, to satisfy not only justice and law, but cowardice, malice, and revenge; it is time our persecution should cease. The nations of Europe are vindicating themselves into freedom; ye talk about it yourselves, and do ye think that we will be left behind? If you will join us, we are ready to embrace you; if you will not, shame and discomfiture await

you. For us, whether supported or not, we are prepared for either event. If freedom comes, we will clasp her to our hearts, and surrender her but with our last breath; if slavery is still to be our portion, we have learned, by bitter experience, to endure; and to that righteous and just God, who has created and preserves us, we commit our cause, nothing doubting, but in the fullness of his good time, that he will manifest his glorious mercies, even unto us; though for wise purposes, he may think fit to continue us a little longer under the rod of our oppressors, the ministers of his wrath."

If such an appeal were made, what should we answer? Let him that can, devise a reply; I know of none.

The argument now stands thus: To oppose the unconstitutional weight of Government, subject as that Government is to the still more unconstitutional and unjust bias of English influance, it is absolutely necessary that the weight of the people's scale should be increased. This object can only be attained by a reform in Parliament, and no reform is practicable, that shall not include the Catholics. These three steps are inseparably connected, and let not any man deceive himself, by supposing the first attainable without the second, or either without the third. Is the present Government of Ireland such an one as ought to be opposed? Every good Irishman will answer, Yes! Have we not sufficient experience, how fruitless all opposition is on the present system? The people are divided; each party afraid and jealous of the other; they have only the justice of their cause to support them, and that plea grievously weakened by the acknowledged exclusion of three-fourths of the nation from their rights as men. Government, a foreign Government, is a small, but a disciplined and compact body, with the sword, the purse, and the honors of Ireland at their disposal. It is easy to see the event of such an opposition to such an Administration. It follows, that, to oppose it with success, the people must change their plan.

Do we not see the conduct of Government at this hour, and shall we not learn wisdom, even from our enemies? They know that the Catholics hold the balance between them and that fraction of the nation, which we choose to dignify with the name of the People; and, therefore, they court the Catholics. If they secure them, I should be glad to know what they have

to fear with the immense power and influence attached to office, with the command of the treasury, and with the whole Catholic party, three-fourths of the kingdom, attached by gratitude to them, and alienated by repeated suspicion, and unremitting ill usage from their enemies.

In a word, the alternative is, on the one hand, reform and the Catholics, justice and liberty; on the other, an unconditional submission to the present, and every future Administration, who may think proper to follow their steps, and who may indulge with ease and safety their propensity to peculation and spoil and insult, while the people remain timid and divided. Between these you must choose, and choose immediately, and that choice may be final.

If the whole body of the people unite with cordial sincerity, and demand a general reform in Parliament, which shall include restitution of the elective franchise to the Catholics, we shall then, and not otherwise, have an honest and independent representation of the people; we shall have a barrier of strength sufficient to defy the utmost efforts of the most profligate and powerful English Administration; we shall be enabled to avail ourselves of the infinite advantages with which Providence has endowed our country; corruption shall be annihilated, Government shall become honest per force, and thereby recover at least some of that respectability which a long course of political depravity has exhausted. In a word, we shall recover our rank, and become a nation in something beside the name.

If, on the other hand, we think reform too dear, when purchased by justice; if we are still illiberal and blind bigots, who deny that civil liberty can exist out of the pale of Protestantism, if we withhold the sacred cup of Liberty from our Catholic brother, and repel him from the communion of our natural rights, let us at least be consistent, and cease to murmur at the oppression of the Government which grinds us; let us bear, if we can, without wincing, the whips and goads of our own tyrants, with the consoling reflection, that we can act the tyrant in our turn, and gall the wretched slaves below us; let Administration proceed to play upon the terrors of the Protestants, the hopes of the Catholics, and balancing the one party by the other, plunder and laugh at, and defy both; let English influence meet and check our rising commerce at every

turn; let us remain obscure and wretched, and unknown in Europe; let the bulk of the people continue barbarians, in hopeless and incurable ignorance, and wretchedness and want. All is well, so long as we can prevent the Catholics from rising to a rank in society with ourselves; we will, in the spirit of the envious man in the fable, bear to lose one of our eyes, so that our neighbor may lose both, and grope about in utter darkness.

But I will hope better things. The example of America, of Poland, and, above all, of France, cannot, on the minds of liberal men, but force conviction. In France, 200,000 Catholics deputed a Protestant, St. Etienne, to the National Assembly, as their representative, with orders to procure, what has since been accomplished, an abolition of all civil distinctions, which were founded merely on religious opinions. In America, the Catholic and Protestant sit equally in Congress, without any contention arising, other than who shall serve his country best: So may it be in Ireland! So will it be, if men are sincere in their wishes for her prosperity and future elevation. Let them but consider what union has done in small states, what discord in great ones. Let them look to their Government; let them look to their fellow slaves, who, by coalition with them, may rise to be their fellow-citizens, and form a new order in their society, a new era in their history. Let them once cry Reform and the Catholics, and Ireland is free, independent, and happy.

August 1, 1791.

A NORTHERN WHIG.

DECLARATION AND RESOLUTIONS

OF THE SOCIETY OF UNITED IRISHMEN OF BELFAST.

IN the present great era of reform, when unjust Governments are falling in every quarter of Europe; when religious persecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; when the rights of men are ascertained in theory, and that theory substantiated by practice; when antiquity can no longer defend absurd and oppressive forms, against the common sense and common interests of mankind; when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people, and to be so far only obligatory as it protects their rights and promotes their welfare: We think it our duty, as Irishmen, to come forward, and state what we feel to be our heavy grievance, and what we know to be its effectual remedy.

WE HAVE NO NATIONAL GOVERNMENT; we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another country, whose instrument is corruption, and whose strength is the weakness of Ireland; and these men have the whole of the power and patronage of the country, as means to seduce and to subdue the honesty and the spirit of her representatives in the legislature. Such an extrinsic power, acting with uniform force in a direction too frequently opposite to the true line of our obvious interests, can be resisted with effect solely by unanimity, decision, and spirit in the people; qualities which may be exerted most legally, constitutionally, and efficaciously, by that great measure essential to the prosperity and freedom of Ireland, AN EQUAL REPRESENTATION OF ALL THE PEOPLE IN PARLIAMENT.

We do not here mention as grievances, the rejection of a placebill, of a pension-bill, of a responsibility-bill, the sale of Peerages in one House, the corruption publicly avowed in the other, nor the notorious infamy of borough traffic between both; not