to refuse them anything more than justice, you will act over again, with the Catholics, the same scene of mean and precipitate submission which disgraced you before America, and before the volunteers of Ireland.  We shall live to hear the Hampstead Protestant pronouncing such extravagant panegyrics upon holy water, and paying such fulsome compliments to the thumbs and offals of departed saints, that parties will change sentiments, and Lord Henry Petty and Sam Whitbread take a spell at No Popery.  The wisdom of Mr. Fox was alike employed in teaching his country justice when Ireland was weak, and dignity when Ireland was strong.  We are fast pacing round the same miserable circle of ruin and imbecility.  Alas! where is our guide?

You say that Ireland is a millstone about our necks; that it would be better for us if Ireland were sunk at the bottom of the sea; that the Irish are a nation of irreclaimable savages and barbarians.  How often have I heard these sentiments fall from the plump and thoughtless squire, and from the thriving English shopkeeper, who has never felt the rod of an Orange master upon his back.  Ireland a millstone about your neck!  Why is it not a stone of Ajax in your hand?  I agree with you most cordially that, governed as Ireland now is, it would be a vast accession of strength if the waves of the sea were to rise and engulf her to-morrow.  At this moment, opposed as we are to all the world, the annihilation of one of the most fertile islands on the face of the globe, containing five millions of human creatures, would be one of the most solid advantages which could happen to this country.  I doubt very much, in spite of all the just abuse which has been lavished upon Bonaparte, whether there is any one of his conquered countries the blotting out of which would be as beneficial to him as the destruction of Ireland would be to us:  of countries I speak differing in language from the French, little habituated to their intercourse, and inflamed with all the resentments of a recently conquered people.  Why will you attribute the turbulence of our people to any cause but the right—­to any cause but your own scandalous oppression?  If you tie your horse up to a gate, and beat him cruelly, is he vicious because he kicks you?  If you have plagued and worried a mastiff dog for years, is he mad because he flies at you whenever he sees you?  Hatred is an active, troublesome passion.  Depend upon it, whole nations have always some reason for their hatred.  Before you refer the turbulence of the Irish to incurable defects in their character, tell me if you have treated them as friends and equals?  Have you protected their commerce?  Have you respected their religion?  Have you been as anxious for their freedom as your own?  Nothing of all this.  What then?  Why you have confiscated the territorial surface of the country twice over:  you have massacred and exported her inhabitants:  you have deprived four-fifths of them of every civil privilege: