nor-a bailable offence; and no magistrate could refuse to take bail for it.

The second was, the criminal neglect and insufficiency of magistrates throughout the disturbed part of the country. To check those alarming acts, he would bring in a Bill, which contained such provisions as were calculated to inflict adequate and effectual punishment on persons guilty of outrage-riot-and illegal combination; and of administering and taking unlawful oaths.

After this candid admission, by the Attorneygeneral, of the extreme wretchedness and misery of the peasantry of the west of Ireland; and after the confession, that the application of adequate and sufficient remedy to heal the public wounds, would require all the talents and understanding of Parliament, it will not be forgotten, that the same law officer opposed every effort made by Mr. Grattan to institute an inquiry into the real cause of the public grievances; and that the Irish Government of 1788 closed their ears against the suggestions of those mild remedies which would have restored peace and comfort to the poor of Ireland!

The Bill now brought in by the Attorneygeneral, for preventing tumultuous Risings and Assemblies, was opposed in every stage by the

patriots of the day as containing clauses unnecessary and unconstitutional. They objected, that the deviations from the English Riot Act were all founded in the greatest severity, with the additional consideration, that the Irish act was to be perpetual.

The Attorney-general supported the deviations from the English Riot Act; but gave up the most odious and objectionable clause-directing the magistrates to demolish the Roman Catholic Chapels in which any combinations had been formed, or an unlawful oath administered.

The Secretary, Mr. Orde, lamented that any thing should have appeared in print, purporting that those insurrections had arisen from a Popish conspiracy!-He declared, he not only did not believe it--but he could say, he knew it not to be true; and asserted, that in some places the insurgents had deprived the Roman Catholic Clergy of one half of their income.

Upon this occasion, Mr. CURRAN came forward, with his accustomed boldness, to arraign the wisdom, the expediency, and the humanity of the Bill proposed by the Attorneygeneral, for the suppression of disturbances ;"What," said Mr. Curran," has been the effect of your sanguinary code against Ireland ?... The overstrained security of your law amounts

universally to the impunity of the offender ;...for every good and social principle in the heart of man is an obstruction to its execution.---The witness---the judge, and the jury, coneur, by every practical artifice, to save the wretch from a punishment inadequate to the crime. I will ever oppose the principle of a Bill that is written in blood.---The general principle receives double strength from the double circumstance of the times.

"The disturbances of the South were not only exaggerated beyond the truth, by every misrepresentation of artful malignity, but were held up to the public mind in so silly or so wicked a point of view, as to make it impossible for Parliament to proceed, without the most imminent danger of sacrificing every advantage we have acquired.---What has been the state of your ecclesiastical polity for centuries ?...The Church of Ireland has been in the hands of strangers, advanced to the mitre, not for their virtues or their knowledge, but quartered on the country, through their own servility, or the caprice of their benefactors; inclined naturally to oppress us, to hate us, and to defame us ;---while the real duties of our religion have been performed by our own native clergy; who, with all the finer feelings of gentlemen and scholars, have

been obliged to do the drudgery of their profession for forty, or at most for fifty pounds a year;—without the means of being liberal, from their poverty; and without the hope of advancing themselves by their learning or their virtues in a country where preferment was notoriously not to be attained by either.

"On this ground, I would vindicate the great body of the native acting clergy of Ireland from any imputation, because of the small progress which Protestantism had made among us; the pride of Episcopacy, and the low state to which our Ministers of the Gospel were reduced, abundantly accounted for it; their distresses and oppression were the real objects of Parliamentary consideration, and not the discovery of new modes of torture, or the enactment of new statutes of blood."

*

No man is to be found, in the history of the Irish Parliament, more distinguished for his sensibility to the distresses and sufferings of his countrymen, of every religious persuasionhis fearless and manly assertion of their claims to the attention, the protection, and the justice of the Legislature, than Mr. Curran, (now Master of the Rolls.)

It is impossible to read over the Parliamen tary History of Ireland, for the last 30 years,

without making frequent pauses, to admire the steady, political virtue-the enlightened-liberal, and comprehensive views-the unrivalled efforts of genius and of wit, of our greatly gifted countryman.

Few Irishmen ever attained so proud and so exalted a situation, as that which Mr. Curran now fills, with such inflexible independence of principle, or of demeanour, or so little humility to men in power and authority -He has risen, by the splendor of his talents, and the integrity of his views, to an almost unexampled degree of public confidence. He is one of the very few, whose constancy to his country has been rewarded by the possession of honors, and emoluments; and was it not for that happy interval, when the great and benevolent mind of Charles Fox commanded an ascendancy in the Councils of His Majesty, we should not now perhaps be able to congratulate our country. men, on the justice which has been done to the transcendant merits of their first advocate, and perhaps the first advocate in the British Empire.

When the politicians of the day, who, (with some exception) have risen in this Country as they gave up its liberty and its honor, shall be mingled in the dust, with the hundreds whose ex