On the second reading of the insurrection bill, sir Lawrence Parsons spoke very fully to the principle of it, though he did not mean to oppose the second reading. He thought that a bill so severe in its nature should have been preceded by some measure which would evince the disposition of the house to attend, as well to the sufferings as to the offences of the people. If the design were to tranquillize the country, and he had no doubt but that was sincerely the object of the right honourable gentleman who had introduced the bill, it would have been right first to have inquired into the cause of the disturbances, before such severe measures were taken to repress them; if the root of the evil were once come at, the evil itself would have been easily removed: but by applying merely to the effect, the cause of the evil was left untouched, and the consequence would be, that it would continue to germinate new evils. He was willing to admit, that the situation of the country was rather improved; but who would deny, that the peasantry of Ireland were still miserable to a very great degree. Let gentlemen enter into the cabin of an Irish labourer, and see it without a chimney, often without a fire, and sometimes without food; and then compare his state with the affluence, the elegance, and the pomp with which the casual circumstances of birth surrounded themselves. He hoped no man would impute to him any wish to inflame the popular mind, or to embarrass his majesty's government. From the commencement of the session, to that hour, he had not brought forward any subject of complaint, nor had he opposed any tax proposed for the security of the state, or the expense of the war. With respect to the bill itself, he thought it was unnecessarily severe; that it was a useless violation of the first principles of the constitution, and that instead of doing service, it was likely to produce a contrary effect. He knew the country gentlemen of Ireland well; he loved them, and throughout that session he had in a great measure regulated his opinion by theirs: he could never believe that they would support this bill, if they saw it in the true point of view: he could not bring himself to think, that they wished to drive their chariot wheels over the necks of the poor; they wished only to restore tranquillity, and to preserve the peace of Ireland, and certainly they would not surrender the established constitution as an experiment. The bill by enabling the magistracy to send out of the kingdom any man they might think guilty, enacted, in fact, a surrender of the constitution, and instead of restoring tranquillity, would aggravate the disorder. It was a peculiar quality of the common people of Ireland, that they communicated quickly and rapidly their pleasures and their discontents. By that bill, if it passed, and if men were sent out of the kingdom by its operation without trial, the common feeling would be, that the

men so transported were innocent; and therefore, instead of quieting the discontent of the people, it would afford a new topic for murmur. If on the contrary, the men so punished had been convicted by a jury, if they were punished for crimes fully proved in an open court of justice, the punishment would operate as a salutary example; and if sedition should murmur at their fate, the good sense of the people would disregard its insinuation. The evil consequences of that bill would extend beyond the present time; for the common people of Ireland were remarkable for a tenacious remembrance of injuries. He instanced the affair of the regiment raised in Ireland, principally in the metropolis, in the last war; they were called the Green Linnets, these men had been enlisted under a promise, that they should not be sent out of the kingdom; but when the regiment was completed, the officers took an opportunity one evening of securing and confining the whole of them, and embarking them in the morning for America. After a lapse of several years, the people of Ireland remembered this fraud so well, that it was a very great impediment, in the beginning, to the recruiting of the militia. If this law would probably be a cause of discontent to every quarter of the country, how much more so must it be in the county of Armagh. In that county it had been proved on oath, that several magistrates refused to take the examination of the injured Catholics. By some of those magistrates, they had been most cruelly prosecuted: others would hear them only out of the window, and some actually turned them from their doors with threats. If such men were entrusted with a power of transporting men at pleasure, what was there to be expected, but the most gross and flagrant violations of justice? After expatiating for some time on this subject with great earnestness, he concluded by recommending it to gentlemen, if they persevered in the measure, that they would at least remember, that the country was engaged in a war, of which the wisest among them could not foresee the event; that a great part of the able and young in the country were then engaged in guilt, which that act would make capital; that it might soon become necessary to apply to those very persons for safety, against a powerful foe, and that therefore it would be wise to introduce some clause of amnesty for past offences, not including murders: to neglect such a clause, would be to reduce the majority of the peasantry of Ireland to the alternative of either persisting in guilt and treason, or submitting to the halter.

Mr. Cuffe could scarcely believe that his honourable friend had uttered such sentiments as he had just heard. He could not help expressing his strong disapprobation, he might say indignation, at the speech of the honourable baronet. He had taken up pres

cisely those two topics, which of all others it was most mischievous to discuss, and had discussed them in such a manner as was best fitted to make them the most mischievous. He had in the first instance displayed and exaggerated the wretchedness of the peasantry, and in the second, he had talked of allowance for their crimes, and indulgence for their treason. The debate* was carried on till two o'clock in the morning: the bill was read a second time, and on the question for committal, it was opposed by lord Edward Fitzgerald alone.

When the report from the committee on the attorney general's bill for the better prevention of conspiracies in that kingdom, was before the house, on the 29th of February, †Mr. Grattan observed, that not having been present at the committee, he had been prevented from proposing an amendment, which he feared from its length, would have but a small chance of being adopted, unless the bill were recommitted; he knew he could move it on report, but it would not have a fair trial in that stage of the bill, and for that reason he wished much, that the bill should be recommitted, as the most parliamentary mode of receiving new matter, and affording to that matter full and ample discussion; the amendment he intended, was to compel the county to pay the countryman, whether labourer or manufacturer, full compensation for his damage and losses to his person, family, or dwelling, suffered in consequence of violent mobs; that he was apprehensive that if the compensation were left optional to the grand jury, nothing would be done; that the grand jury would readily present for damages suffered by magistrates or witnesses, but they probably would not, in the county of Armagh particularly, give any adequate, or indeed any satisfaction for losses suffered by the Catholic weaver or peasant, and therefore it was not enough that grand juries should have the power, it was indispensable to impose the obligation. Government trifled with the northern weaver, when he sent him for satisfaction to a grand jury, composed of those very magistrates, whose supiness, or partiality, or bigotry, had been the cause of his losses and his emigration. He said he therefore had formed a clause, which he would read, and by which it was rendered obligatory on the county, to indemnify the countryman for the injury he received when beaten or abused,

⚫ In the course of this debate Mr. Archdall animadverted to the affairs of Armagh he professed habits of intimacy with the noble lord (Gosford) whose letter or speech upon the subject of that country had made such noise he declared he thought that letter incautious, and such as the noble lord on reflection would not approve of: he recommended rather the conduct of that nobleman, than his publication as an object of imitation. For this letter, which is a most valuable piece of unimpeachable evidence of the spirit and nature of the persecutions then going forward in Armagh, vide Appendix No. XCIX. 16 Par. Deb. p. 150.

or driven from his land and habitation. He said he had read the bill, that he could find no remedy whatsoever in the bill, as at present formed, for such a case, that in the different preambles the grievance was not set forth, and in the various provisions it was not comprehended; that the bill complains of violence to magistrates, of the murder of witnesses, of illegal oaths, &c. &c. but of the threats, and force, and violence offered to certain of his majesty's subjects, whereby they have been forced to quit their trades, their lands and their tenements, outrages of which the governor of a northern county had complained as unexampled in history, and to which violence and atrocity the magistrates of that county had borne their testimony by a formal resolution, there was in the bill complete silence and omission. The bill proposed to give extra power to magistrates; this might be very effectual, as to certain parts of the country; but what was the grievance of Armagh? That the magistrates had not used the ordinary powers, and in some cases had abused those powers in such a manner, that the subject had not been protected, and the rioter had been encouraged; that the bill appeared therefore without that clause, was not faithful to its own principle, it was a bill, unless amended, of partial coercion, and partial redress: it punished (as it stood) disturbance in one part of the kingdom; it compromised with disturbances in another; it protected the magistrates of the west, and left exposed the poor of the north; it says, if you murder a magistrate, you shall pay his represen tatives; but if you drive away whole droves of weavers in Armagh, you shall pay nothing, except those persons please, by whose fault they have been driven away and scattered over the face of the earth. He said, that ministers must know perfectly well, that unless the amendment were adopted, the unfortunate description of persons he mentioned would get no redress; the government might indeed send a military force to guard what remained of them, but as to the bill, it left them precisely as they were; to say that the existing law punished the offences committed against them was true, so did the existing law punish the of fences committed against magistrates and witnesses; it was therefore an argument against the whole of the bill, as much as against the amendment: but to say that existing law punished those offences in such a summary manner as was necessary to restrain them, was unfounded: the truth was, the existing law was not sufficient for the case of Armagh, and the bill did not advert to that case at all: but it had happened that the poorer classes of people had suffered in other places as well as Armagh from mobs, and their houses had been burned without any redress. When the magistrate had suffered, the jury had given meet compensation: when the countryman had his house pulled down,

they in some cases had given nothing; a proof that the existing law was not sufficient, and therefore that the amendment was necessary, and accordingly the amendment was not confined to one county, but was general; and wherever the subject had suffered in his person, property, or dwelling, obliged the county to give him satisfaction: for gentlemen will indemnify one another; but it is not equally certain that they would indemnify their inferiors; it was therefore submitted to them that they should take that into consideration, and for the cure of a grievance, as notorious as any set forth in the bill, and as unrelenting and outrageous as any thing suffered by gentleman or magistrate; that they should amend their bill, and adopt a proposal which made it a bill of general relief, and which would tend to reconcile the country people, to the strength of the whole of its provisions, when they found themselves included in its redress and protection. The best way of adopting the amendment, was to recommit the bill; for if it were proposed on the report, it was easy to foresee that it would not have a full discussion or a fair chance; whereas if the bill were in a committee, it was impossible that those persons, who were friends to the principle of the bill on the real motive of protecting the subject in a summary manner, should not be friends to the amendment. It was the more desirable to proceed by recommitting the bill, because there were other gentlemen who had amendments to propose, one with respect to juries, which seemed deserving of every consideration. that proposal, however, of recommitting the bill, did not proceed from a wish to oppose its progress, or to interpose delay, but from a conviction that the bill, without the amendment suggested, was false to its own principle, and from a well grounded fear that the proposal of such an amendment in the house, would not be attended with a fair trial, a full discussion, or the chance of success.

That

The attorney general replied to Mr. Grattan. He opposed the recommittal, because the objects at which the amendments to be proposed aimed, were already attained by the existing laws. Those offences which had been mentioned by the right honourable gentleman, as being prevalent in the county of Armagh, and which were 'called papering, i. e. the expulsion of persons from their lands or habitations, by affixing written threats on their houses, &c. were already made felony of death, by the acts of the 15th and 16th of George II. It was therefore unnecessary to enact new punishments in this bill, against a crime to which the law had already annexed the highest penalty which could be inflicted. With respect to the other object, that of indemnity to the sufferers, that too was already provided for by law; for at present the grand jury at the recommendation of the judge before