know by what authority they have acted. By what authority did Government enforce the articles of war? By what authority does Government establish the post-office? By what authority are our merchants bound by the charter of the East India Company? By what authority has Ireland, for near one hundred years been deprived of her export trade? By what authority are her peers deprived of their judicature? By what authority has that judicature been transferred to the peers of Great Britain, and our property in its last resort referred to the decision of a non-resident, unauthorised, and unconstitutional tribunal? Will ministers say it was the authority of the British Parliament? On what ground, then, do they place the question between the Government on one side, and the volunteer on the other? According to their own statement, the Government has been occupied in superseding the lawgiver of the country; and the volunteers are here to restore him. The Government has contended for the usurpation, and the people for the laws. His Majesty's late ministers imagined they had quelled the country when they had bought the newspapers; and they represented us as wild men, and our cause as visionary; and they pensioned a set of wretches to abuse both: but we took little account of them or their proceedings, and we waited and we watched, and we moved, as it were, on our native hills, with the minor remains of our parliamentary army, until that minority became Ireland. Let those ministers now go home, and congratulate their king on the redemption of his people. Did you imagine that those little parties whom three years ago you beheld in awkward squads parading in the streets, should have now arrived to such distinction and effect? What was the cause? for it was not the sword of the volunteer, nor his muster, nor his spirit, nor his promptitude to put down accidental disturbance or public disorder, nor his own unblamed and distinguished deportment. This was much; but there was more than this: the upper orders, the property, and the abilities of the country, formed with the volunteer; and the volunteer had sense enough to obey them. This united the Protestant with the Catholic, and the landed proprietor with the people. There was still more than this; there was a continence which confined the corps to limited and legitimate objects; there was a principle which preserved the corps from adultery with French politics; there was a good taste which guarded the corps from the affectation of such folly: this, all this, made them bold; for it kept them innocent, it kept them rational: no vulgar rant against England; no mysterious admiration of France; no crime to conceal-no folly to be ashamed of. They were what they professed to be; and that was nothing less than the society asserting

her liberty, according to the frame of the British constitution, her inheritance to be enjoyed in perpetual connection with the British empire.

I do not mean to say that there were not divers violent and unseemly resolutions; the immensity of the means was inseparable from the excess.

Such are the great works of nature: such is the sea; but, like the sea, the waste and excess were lost in the advantage: and now, having given a parliament to the people, the volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the people to Parliament, and thus close, specifically and majestically, a great work, which will place them above censure and above panegyric. These associations, like other institutions, will perish they will perish with the occasion that gave them being, and the gratitude of their country will write their epitaph, and say, "This phenomenon, the departed volunteer, justified only by the occasion, the birth of spirit and grievances, with some alloy of public evil, did more public good to Ireland than all her institutions; he restored the liberties of his country, and thus from the grave he answers his enemies." Connected by freedom as well as by allegiance, the two nations, Great Britain and Ireland, form a constitutional confederacy as well as one empire; the crown is one link, the constitution another; and, in my mind, the latter link is the most powerful.

You can get a king any where, but England is the only country with whom you can participate a free constitution. This makes England your natural connexion, and her king your natural as well as your legal sovereign: this is a connexion, not as Lord Coke has idly said, not as Judge Blackstone has foolishly said, not as other judges have ignorantly said, by conquest; but as Molyneux has said, and as I now say, by compact; and that compact is a free constitution. Suffer me now to state some of the things essential to that free constitution; they are as follows: the independency of the Irish Parliament; the exclusion of the British Parliament from any authority in this realm; the restoration of the Irish judicature, and the exclusion of that of Great Britain. As to the perpetual mutiny bill, it must be more than limited; it must be effaced; that bill must fall, or the constitution cannot stand; that bill was originally limited by this House to two years, and it returned from England without the clause of limitation. What? a bill making the army independent of Parliament, and perpetual! I protested against it then, I have struggled with it since, and I am now come to destroy this great enemy of my country. The perpetual mutiny bill must vanish out of the statute book; the excellent tract of Molyneux was burned; it was not answered; and its flame illumined

posterity. This evil paper shall be burned, but burned like a felon, that its execution may be a peace-offering to the people, and that a declaration of right may be planted on its guilty ashes; a new mutiny bill must be formed after the manner of England, and a declaration of right put in the front of it.

As to the legislative powers of the Privy Councils, I conceive them to be utterly inadmissible against the constitution, against the privileges of Parliament, and against the dignity of the realm. Do not imagine such power to be theoretical; it is in a very high degree a practical evil. I have here an inventory of bills altered and injured by the interference of the Privy Councils; money bills originated by them, protests by the Crown in support of those money bills, prorogation following these protests. I have here a mutiny bill of 1780, altered by the Council, and made perpetual; a Catholic bill in 1778, where the Council struck out the clause repealing the test act; a militia bill, where the Council struck out the compulsory clause requiring the Crown to proceed to form a militia, and left it optional to His Majesty's minister whether there should be a militia, in Ireland. I have the money bill of 1775, where the Council struck out the clause enabling His Majesty to take a part of our troops for general service, and left it to the minister to withdraw the forces against act of parliament. I have to state the altered money bill of 1771, the altered money bill of 1775, the altered money bill of 1780; the day would expire before I could recount their ill-doings. I will never consent to have men (God knows whom), ecclesiastics, &c. &c., men unknown to the constitution of Parliament, and only known to the minister, who has breathed into their nostrils an unconstitutional existence, steal to their dark divan to do mischief and make nonsense of bills, which their Lordships, the House of Lords, or we, the House of Commons, have thought good and fit for the people. No; those men have no legislative qualifications; they shall have no legislative power.

1st. The repeal of the perpetual mutiny bill, and the dependency of the Irish army on the Irish Parliament.

2nd. The abolition of the legislative power of the Council.

3rd. The abrogation of the claim of England to make law for Ireland.

4th. The exclusion of the English House of Peers, and of the English King's Bench, from any judicial authority in this realm. 5th. The restoration of the Irish Peers to their final judicature.-The independency of the Irish Parliament in its sole and exclusive legislature.

These are my terms. I will take nothing from the Crown.

Mr. Grattan then moved, by way of amendment,

That an humble address be presented to His Majesty, to return His Majesty the thanks of this House for his most gracious message to this House, signified by His Grace the Lord-lieutenant.

To assure His Majesty of our unshaken attachment to His Majesty's person and government, and of our lively sense of his paternal care in thus taking the lead to administer content to His Majesty's subjects of Ireland.

That, thus encouraged by his royal interposition, we shall beg leave, with all duty and affection, to lay before His Majesty the causes of our discontents and jealousies. To assure His Majesty that his subjects of Ireland are a free people. That the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown inseparably annexed to the crown of Great Britain, on which connection the interests and happiness of both nations essentially depend: but that the kingdom of Ireland is a distinct kingdom, with a parliament of her own-the sole legislature thereof. That there is no body of men competent to make laws to bind this nation except the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland; nor any other parliament which hath any authority or power of any sort whatsoever in this country save only the Parliament of Ireland. To assure His Majesty, that we humbly conceive that in this right the very essence of our liberties exist; a right which we, on the part of all the people of Ireland, do claim as their birthright, and which we cannot yield but with our lives.

To assure His Majesty, that we have seen with concern certain claims advanced by the Parliament of Great Britain, in an act entitled "An act for the better securing the dependency of Ireland:" an act containing matter entirely irreconcilable to the fundamental rights of this nation. That we conceive this act, and the claims it advances, to be the great and principal cause of the discontents and jealousies in this kingdom.

To assure His Majesty, that His Majesty's Commons of Ireland do most sincerely wish that all bills which become law in Ireland should receive the approbation of His Majesty under the seal of Great Britain; but that yet we do consider the practice of suppressing our bills in the council of Ireland, or altering the same any where, to be another just cause of discontent and jealousy.

To assure His Majesty, that an act, entitled "An act for the better accommodation of His Majesty's forces," being unlimited in duration, and defective in other instances, but passed in that shape from the particular circumstances of the times, is another just cause of discontent and jealousy in this kingdom.

That we have submitted these, the principal causes of the present discontent and jealousy of Ireland, and remain in humble expectation of redress.

That we have the greatest reliance on His Majesty's wisdom, the most sanguine expectations from his virtuous choice of a Chief Governor, and great confidence in the wise, auspicious, and constitutional councils which we see, with satisfaction, His Majesty has adopted.

That we have, moreover, a high sense and veneration for the British character, and do therefore conceive that the proceedings of this country, founded as they were in right, and tempered by duty, must have excited the approbation and esteem instead of wounding the pride of the British nation.

And we beg leave to assure His Majesty, that we are the more confirmed in this hope, inasmuch as the people of this kingdom have never expressed a desire to share the freedom of England, without declaring a determination to share her fate likewise, standing and falling with the British nation.

SIMPLE REPEAL.

19th July, 1782.

On the 17th Mr. Flood expressed himself dissatisfied with what had been done regarding the independence of the country. He said that his object was to obtain legal security; he gave notice that he would bring forward a question on the subject on the 19th, and this day he made his promised motion. He recapitulated the arguments that he had used before, and considered that legal security was the best security that could be obtained. The crowns of the two kingdoms were already united by an Irish law, declaring that whoever wore the imperial crown of England should also wear the imperial crown of Ireland· his object now was, to secure the rights of Parliament as well as those of the Crown, as he thought the late transactions totally inadequate to the security of the rights of Ireland: the 6th of George the First was a declaratory law; and a declaratory law only stated what the law previously was, but did not enact a new law, and therefore left the law as it stood before: he accordingly moved, "That leave be given to bring in heads of a bill for declaring the sole and exclusive right of the Irish Parliament to make laws in all cases whatsoever, internal and external, for the kingdom of Ireland." This was supported by Mr. English, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Walsh: it was strongly opposed by Mr. Bagenal, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Ogle, Mr. Bushe, Mr. Hartley, and Mr. Yelverton: they said that Mr. Flood had very properly called it the shadow of English legislative authority, and that his bill would go to admit, that the right to legislate for