If, however, you could find out those pedigrees of guilt, I do not think the difference would be essential.  History records many things which ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account.  What lesson does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us?  It ought to lesson us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times.  To that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind.  They ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations which formerly inflamed the furious factions which had torn their country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and abominable things which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured, robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years after, to find some color for justifying them in the eternal proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.

Let us come to a later period of those confiscations with the memory of which the gentlemen who triumph in the acts of 1782 are so much delighted.  The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in 1688, and the English Parliament again put up to sale the greatest part of their estates.  I do not presume to defend the Irish for this rebellion, nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation.  The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James’s power.  He threw himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their feeble power.  Be the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated sovereign, against a prince whom the Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion more than the former.  It might, however, admit some palliation in them.  In generous minds some small degree of compassion might be excited for an error, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a conqueror, quadam specie et similitudine pacis, not without a mistaken appearance of duty, and for which the guilty have suffered, by exile abroad and slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence.  The best calculators compute that Ireland lost two hundred thousand of her inhabitants in that struggle.  If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated.  For, if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James.  The Irish Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect, and who, far from trespassing on their liberties and properties, secured both them and the independence of their country in much the same manner that we have seen the same things done at the period of 1782,—­I trust the last revolution in Ireland.