are his claims when put into comparison with | to die. For God's sake, Mr. Fitzgerald, as those of Mr. Murphy of Corofin, to the confi- you are a gentleman and a man of honour, indence, to the affection, and to the fidelity of terpose your influence with your friends, and the peasants who are committed to his care? redeem your pledge. I address myself perHe is not only the minister of that humble sonally to you. On the first day of the elecaltar at which their forefathers and them- tion you declared that you would deprecate selves were taught to kneel, but he is their persecution, and that you were the last to kind, their familiar, yet most respected friend. wish that vindictive measures should be emIn their difficulties and distresses they have ployed. I believe you-and I call upon you no one else to look to; he never fails when to redeem that pledge of mercy, to perform consulted by them to associate his sympathy that great moral promise. You will cover with his admonition; for their sake he is yourself with honour by so doing, in the same ready to encounter every hazard, and in the way that you will share in the ignominy that performance of the perilous duties incident to will attend upon any expedients of rigour. his sacerdotal office he never hesitates to ex- Before you leave this country to assume your pose his life. In a stormy night a knocking high functions, enjoin your friends with that is heard at the door of the priest of Corofin. eloquence of which you are the master, to reHe is told that at the foot of the mountain a frain from cruelty, and not to oppress their man of guilt and blood has scarcely more than tenants. Tell them, sir, that instead of busyan hour to live. Will the teacher of the ing themselves in the worthless occupation of gospel tarry because of the rain and of the revenge, it is much fitter that they should take wind, and wait until the day shall break, the political condition of their country into when the soul of an expiring sinner can be their deep consideration. Tell them that they saved, and the demons that are impatient for should address themselves to the legislature, him can still be scared away? He goes forth and implore a remedy for these frightful evils. in the blackness of the tempestuous midnight Tell them to call upon the men in whose hands -he ascends the hill, he traverses the morass the destiny of this great empire is placed to --and faint, and cold, and dripping, finds his adopt a system of peace, and to apply to Ireway to the hovel where his coming is awaited: land the great canon of political morality— -with what a gasping of inarticulate grati- pacis imponere morem. Let it not be imatude-with what a smile of agony is he wel gined that any measure of disfranchisement, comed! No fear of contagion, no dread of the that any additional penalty, will afford a exhalations of mortality reeking from the bed remedy. Things have been permitted to adof the pestilential man can appall him, but vance to a height from which they cannot rekneeling down at the side of the departing cede. culprit, and sustaining him in his arms, he receives from lips impregnated with death the whisper with which the heart is unloaded of its mysteries, and, raising up his eyes to heaven, pronounces the ritual of absolution in the name of Him of whose commission of mercy he is the befitting bearer, and whose precepts he illustrates in his life and inculcates in his example. And can you feel wonder and resentment that under the influence of such a man as I have described to you, your dependants should have ventured upon a violation of your mandates? Forgive me if I venture to supplicate, on behalf of your tenants, for forbearance. Pardon them, in the name of One who will forgive you your offences in the same measure of compassion which you will show to the trespasses of those who have sinned against yourselves. Do not persecute these poor people: don't throw their children upon the public road, and send them forth to starve, to shiver, and dition. tion? Protestants, awake to a sense of your conWhat have you seen during this elecEnough to make you feel that it is not a mere local excitation, but that seven millions of Irish people are completely arrayed and organized. That which you behold in Clare you would behold, under similar circumstances, in every county in the kingdom. Did you mark our discipline, our subordination, our good order, and that tranquillity which is formidable indeed? You have seen sixty thousand men under our command, and not a hand was raised and not a forbidden word was uttered in that amazing multitude. You have beheld an example of our power in the almost miraculous sobriety of the people. Their lips have not touched that infuriating beverage to which they are so much attached, and their habitual propensity vanished at our command. Is it meet and wise to leave us armed with such a dominion? Trust us not with it; strip us of this appalling power; dis array us by equality; instead of angry slaves | England afford the confutation. The body of make us contented citizens; if you do not, tremble for the result. SPEECH AT PENENDEN HEATH.1 your common laws was given by the Catholic Alfred. He gave you your judges, your magistrates, your high sheriffs (you, sir, hold your office, and have called this great assembly, by virtue of his institutions)-your courts of justice, your elective system, and the great bulwark of your liberties, the trial by jury. When Englishmen peruse the chronicles of their glory, their hearts beat high with exultation, their emotions are profoundly stirred, and their souls are ardently expanded. Where is the English boy who reads the story of his great island, whose pulse does not beat at the name of Runnymede, and whose nature is not deeply thrilled at the contemplation of that great incident when the mitred Langton, with his uplifted crosier, confronted the tyrant, whose sceptre shook in his trembling hand, and extorted what you have so justly called the Great, and what, I trust in God, you will have cause to designate as your everlasting Charter? It was by a Catholic pontiff that the foundation-stone in the temple of liberty was laid; and it was at the altars of that religion which you are accustomed to consider as the handmaid of oppression, that the architects of the constitution knelt down. Who conferred Let no man believe that I have come here in order that I might enter the lists of religious controversy and engage with any of you in a scholastic disputation. In the year 1828 the Real Presence does not afford an appropriate subject for debate, and it is not by the shades of a mystery that the rights of a British citizen are to be determined. I do not know whether there are many here by whom I am regarded as an idolater because I conscientiously adhere to the faith of your forefathers, and profess the doctrine in which I was born and bred; but if I am so accounted by you, you ought not to inflict a civil deprivation upon the accident of the cradle. You ought not to punish me for that for which I am not in reality to blame. If you do you will make the misfortune of the Catholic the fault of the Protestant, and by inflicting a wrong upon my religion cast a discredit upon your own. I am not the worse subject of my king, and the worse citizen of my country, because I concur in the belief of the great majority of the Christian world; and I will venture to add, with the frankness and something of the bluntness by which Englishmen are considered to be characterized, that if I am an idolater, I have a right to be one if I choose; my idolatry is a branch of my prerogative, and is no business of yours. But you have been told by Lord Winchelsea that the Catholic religion is the adversary of freedom. It may occur to you, perhaps, that his lord-pression of British freedom can, in a single ship affords a proof in his own person that a passion for Protestantism and a love of liberty are not inseparably associated; but without instituting too minute or embarrassing an inquiry into the services to freedom which in the course of his political life have been conferred by my Lord Winchelsea, and putting aside all personal considerations connected with the accuser, let me proceed to the accusation. Calumniators of Catholicism, have you read the history of your country? Of the charges against the religion of Ireland the annals of 1 Delivered in October, 1828, on the occasion of the inhabitants of Kent taking alarm on learning that some great measure connected with the Irish Roman Catholics was under discussion in the cabinet. upon the people the right of self-taxation, and fixed, if he did not create, the representation of the people? The Catholic Edward the First; while in the reign of Edward the Third perfection was given to the representative system, parliaments were annually called, and the statute against constructive treason was enacted. It is false, foully, infamously false, that the Catholic religion, the religion of your forefathers, the religion of seven millions of your fellow-subjects, has been the auxiliary of debasement, and that to its influences the sup instance, be referred. I am loath to say that which can give you cause to take offence; but when the faith of my country is made the object of imputation I cannot help, I cannot refrain from breaking into a retaliatory interrogation, and from asking whether the overthrow of the old religion of England was not effected by a tyrant, with a hand of iron and a heart of stone? whether Henry did not trample upon freedom, while upon Catholicism he set his foot; and whether Elizabeth herself, the virgin of the Reformation, did not inherit her despotism with her creed; whether in her reign the most barbarous atrocities were not committed; whether torture, in violation of the Catholic common law of England, was not politically inflicted, and with the shrieks of | opening of every session in which they were agony the Towers of Julius, in the dead of convened, that they were greater and invested night, did not re-echo? And to pass to a more recent period, was it not on the very day on which Russell perished on the scaffold that the Protestant University of Oxford published the declaration in favour of passive obedience, to which your Catholic ancestors would have laid down their lives rather than have submitted? These are facts taken from your own annals, with which every one of you should be made familiar; but it is not to your own annals that the recriminatory evidence, on which I am driven to rely, shall be confined. If your religion is the inseparable attendant upon liberty, how does it come to pass that Prussia, and Sweden, and Denmark, and half the German states should be Protestants, and should be also slaves? You may suggest to me that in the larger portion of Catholic Europe freedom does not exist; but you should bear in mind that at a period when the Catholic religion was in its most palmy state freedom flourished in the countries in which it is now extinct. Look at Italy, not indeed as she now is, but as she was before Martin Luther was born, when literature and liberty were associated, and the arts imparted their embellishments to her free political institutions. I call up the memory of the Italian Catholic republics in the great cause which I am sufficiently adventurous to plead before you. Florence, accomplished, manufacturing, and democratic, the model of your own municipal corporations, gives a noble evidence in favour of Catholicism; and Venice, Catholic Venice, rises in the splendour of her opulence and the light of her liberty, to corroborate the testimony of her celebrated sister with a still more lofty and majestic attestation. If from Italy I shall ascend the Alps, shall I not find, in the mountains of Switzerland, the sublime memorials of liberty, and the reminiscences of those old achievements which preceded the theology of Geneva, and which were performed by men by whom the ritual of Rome was uttered on the glaciers, and the great mystery of Catholicism was celebrated on the altars which nature had provided for that high and holy worship? But Spain, I may be told, Spain affords the proof that to the purposes of despotism her religion has always lent its impious and disastrous aid. That mistake is a signal one, for when Spain was most devotedly Catholic, Spain was comparatively free - her cortes assumed an attitude nobler even than your own parliament, and told the king, at the with a higher authority than himself. In the struggles made by Spaniards within our own memory we have seen the revival of that lofty sentiment; while amongst the descendants of Spaniards, in the provinces of South America, called into existence in some sort by yourselves, we behold no religion but the Catholic, and no government of which the principle is not founded in the supremacy of the people. Republic after republic has arisen at your bidding through that immeasurable expanse, and it is scarce an exaggeration to say (if I may allude to a noble passage in one of the greatest writers of our time), that liberty, with her "meteor standard" unfurled upon the Andes, "Looks from her throne of clouds o'er half the world." False, I repeat it, with all the vehemence of indignant asseveration, utterly false is the charge habitually preferred against the religion which Englishmen have laden with penalties, and have marked with degradation. I can bear with any other charge but this to any other charge I can listen with endurance: tell me that I prostrate myself before a sculptured marble; tell me that to a canvas glowing with the imagery of heaven I bend my knee; tell me that my faith is my perdition:-and as you traverse the churchyards in which your forefathers are buried, pronounce upon those who have lain there for many hundred years a fearful and appalling sentence:-yes; call what I regard as the truth not only an error, but a sin to which mercy shall not be extended: all this I will bear-to all this I will submit-nay, at all this I will but smile :-but do not tell me that I am in heart and creed a slave:-that my countrymen cannot brook; in their own bosoms they carry the high consciousness that never was imputation more foully false or more detestably calumnious. I do not believe that with the passion for true liberty a nation was ever more enthusiastically inspired -never were men more resolvednever were men more deserving to be free than the nation in whose oppression, fatally to Ireland and to themselves, the statesmen of England have so madly persevered. What have been the results of that system which you have been this day called together to sustain? You behold in Ireland a beautiful country, with wonderful advantages agricultural and commercial-a resting-place for trade on its way to either hemisphere; indented with havens, watered by numerous rivers; with a fortunate climate in which fertility is raised upon a rich soil, and inhabited by a bold, intrepid, and, with all their faults, a generous and enthusiastic people. Such is Ireland as God made her what is Ireland as you have made her? This fine country, swarming with a population the most miserable in Europe, of whose wretchedness, if you are the authors, you are beginning to be the victims -the poisoned chalice is returned in its just circulation to your lips. Harvests the most abundant are reaped by men with starvation in their faces; all the great commercial facilities of the country are lost-the rivers that should circulate opulence, and turn the machinery of a thousand manufactures, flow to the ocean without wafting a boat or turning a wheel the wave breaks in solitude in the silent magnificence of deserted and shipless harbours. In place of being a source of wealth and revenue to the empire, Ireland cannot defray its own expenses; her discontent costs millions of money; she debilitates and endangers England. The great mass of her population are alienated and dissociated from the state the influence of the constituted and legitimate authorities is gone; a strange, anomalous, and unexampled kind of government has sprung up, and exercises a despotic sway; while the class inferior in numbers, but accustomed to authority, and infuriated at its loss, are thrown into formidable reaction-the most ferocious passions rage from one extremity of the country to the other. Hundreds and thousands of men, arrayed with badges, gather in the south, and the smaller faction, with discipline and with arms, are marshalled in the north-the country is like one vast magazine of powder, which a spark might ignite into an explosion, and of which England would not only feel, but perhaps never recover from the shock. And is this state of things to be permitted to continue? It is only requisite to present the question in order that all men should answer-something must be done. What is to be done? Are you to re-enact the Penal Code? Are you to deprive Catholics of their properties, to shut up their schools, to drive them from the bar, to strip them of the elective franchise, and reduce them to Egyptian bondage? It is easy for some visionary in oppression to imagine these things. In the drunkenness of sacerdotal debauch men have been found to give vent to such sanguinary aspirations, and the teachers of the gospel, the ministers of a mild and merciful Redeemer, have uttered in the midst of their ferocious wassails, the bloody orison, that their country should be turned into one vast field of massacre, and that upon the pile of carnage the genius of Orange ascendency should be enthroned. But these men are maniacs in ferocity, whose appetites for blood you will scarcely undertake to satiate. You shrink from the extirpation of a whole people. Even suppose that with an impunity as ignominious as it would be sanguinary, that horrible crime could be effected, then you must needs ask, What is to be done? In answering that question you will not dismiss from your recollection that the greatest statesmen who have for the last fifty years directed your councils and conducted the business of this mighty empire concurred in the opinion that, without a concession of the Catholic claims, nothing could be done for Ireland. Burke, the foe to revolution-Fox, the assertor of popular right-Pitt, the prop of the prerogative, concurred. With reference to this great question their minds met in a deep confluence. See to what a conclusion you must arrive when you denounce the advocates of emancipation. Your anathema will take in one-half of Westminster Abbey; and is not the very dust into which the tongues and hearts of Pitt, and Burke, and Fox have mouldered, better than the living hearts and tongues of those who have survived them? If you were to try the question by the authorities of the dead, and by those voices which may be said to issue from the grave, how would you decide? If, instead of counting votes in St. Stephen's, you were to count the tombs in the mausoleum beside it, how would the division of the great departed stand? There would be a majority of sepulchres inscribed with immortal names upon our side. But supposing that authority, that the coincidence of the wisest and of the best in favour of Ireland was to be held in no account, consider how the religious disqualifications must necessarily operate. Can that be a wise course of government which creates not an aristocracy of opulence, and rank, and talent, but an aristocracy in religion, and places seven millions of people at the feet of a few hundred thousand? Try this fashion of government by a very obvious test, and make the case your own. If a few hundred thousand Presbyterians stood towards you in the relation in which the Irish Protestants stand towards the Catholics, would you endure it? Would you brook a system under which Episcopalians should be rendered incapable of holding seats in the House of Commons, should be excluded from sheriffships and corporate offices, and from the bench of justice, and from all the higher offices in the administration of the law; and should be tried by none but Presbyterian juries, flushed with the insolence of power and infuriated with all the ferocity of passion? How would you brook the degradation which would arise from such a system, and the scorn and contumelies which would flow from it? Would you listen with patience to men who told you that there was no grievance in all this—that your complaints were groundless, and that the very right of murmuring ought to be taken away? Are Irishmen and Roman Catholics so differently constituted from yourselves that they are to behold nothing but blessings in a system which you would look upon as an unendurable wrong? Protestants and Englishmen, however debased you may deem our country, believe me that we have enough of human nature left within us—we have enough of the spirit of manhood, all Irishmen as we are-to resent a usage of this kind. Its results are obvious. The nation is divided into two castes. The powerful and the privileged few are patricians in religion, and trample upon and despise the plebeian Christianity of the millions who are laid prostrate at their feet. Every Protestant thinks himself a Catholic's better; and every Protestant feels himself the member of a privileged corporation. Judges, sheriffs, crown counsel, crown attorneys, juries, are Protestants to a man. What confidence can a Catholic have in the administration of public justice? We have the authority of an eminent Irish judge, the late Mr. Fletcher, who declared that, in the north, the Protestants were uniformly acquitted and the Catholics were as undeviatingly condemned. A body of armed Orangemen fall upon and put to death a defenceless Catholic; they are put upon their trial, and when they raise their eyes and look upon the jury, as they are commanded to do, they see twelve of their brethren in massacre impannelled for their trial. And, after this, I shall be told that all the evils of Catholic disqualification lie in the disappointed longing of some dozen gentlemen after the House of Commons! No; it is the bann, the opprobrium, the brand, the note and mark of dishonour, the scandalous partiality, the flagitious bias, the sacrilegious and perjured leaning, and the monstrous and hydra-headed injustice that constitute the grand and essential evils of the country. And you think it wonderful that we should be indignant at all this. You marvel and are amazed that we are hurried into the use of rash and vehement phrases. Have we alone forgotten the dictates of charity?-have our opponents been always distinguished by their meekness and forbearance?—have no exasperating expressions, no galling taunts, no ferocious menaces ever escaped from them? Look to the Brunswick orgies of Ireland, and behold not merely the torturers of '98, who, like retired butchers, feel the want of their old occupation and long for the political shambles again, but to the ministers of the gospel, by whom their libations to the Moloch of faction, in the revelries of a sanguinary ascendency are ferociously poured out. Make allowances for the excesses into which, with much provocation, we may be hurried, and pardon us when you recollect how, under the same circumstances, you would, in all likelihood, feel yourselves. I should have done; and yet before I retire from your presence, indulge me so far as to permit me to press one remaining topic upon you. I have endeavoured to show you that you have mistaken the character and political principles of my religion; I have endeavoured to make you sensible of the miserable condition of my country; to impress upon you the failure of all the means which have been hitherto tried to tranquillize that unhappy country, and the necessity of adopting some expedient to alleviate its evils. I have dwelt upon the concurrence of great authorities in favour of concession; the little danger that is to be apprehended from that concession, and the great benefit which would arise from religious peace in Ireland. I might enlarge upon those benefits, and show you that when factions were reconciled, when the substantial causes of animosity were removed, the fierce passions which agitate the country would be laid at rest; that English capital would, in all likelihood, flow into Ireland; that English habits would gradually arise; that a confidence in the administration of justice would grow up-that the people, instead of appealing to arms for redress, would look to the public tribunals as the only arbiters of right; and that the obstacles which now stand in the way of education would be removed that the fierceness of polemics would be superseded by that charity which the Christian extends to all mankind; that a reciprocal sentiment of kindness would take place between the two islands that a real union, not depending upon acts of parliament, but upon mutual interest and affection, would be permanently established |