the Roman Catholics of Ireland were so quiet that the Lord Lieutenant could, without the smallest risk, send several regiments across Saint George’s Channel to recruit the army of the Duke of Cumberland.  Nor was this submission the effect of content, but of mere stupefaction and brokenness of heart.  The iron had entered into the soul.  The memory of past defeats, the habit of daily enduring insult and oppression, had cowed the spirit of the unhappy nation.  There were indeed Irish Roman Catholics of great ability, energy and ambition; but they were to be found every where except in Ireland, at Versailles and at Saint Ildefonso, in the armies of Frederic and in the armies of Maria Theresa.  One exile became a Marshal of France.  Another became Prime Minister of Spain.  If he had staid in his native land he would have been regarded as an inferior by all the ignorant and worthless squireens who drank the glorious and immortal memory.  In his palace at Madrid he had the pleasure of being assiduously courted by the ambassador of George the Second, and of bidding defiance in high terms to the ambassador of George the Third.140 Scattered over all Europe were to be found brave Irish generals, dexterous Irish diplomatists, Irish Counts, Irish Barons, Irish Knights of Saint Lewis and of Saint Leopold, of the White Eagle and of the Golden Fleece, who, if they had remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations.  These men, the natural chiefs of their race, having been withdrawn, what remained was utterly helpless and passive.  A rising of the Irishry against the Englishry was no more to be apprehended than a rising of the women and children against the men.141

There were indeed, in those days, fierce disputes between the mother country and the colony; but in those disputes the aboriginal population had no more interest than the Red Indians in the dispute between Old England and New England about the Stamp Act.  The ruling few, even when in mutiny against the government, had no mercy for any thing that looked like mutiny on the part of the subject many.  None of those Roman patriots, who poniarded Julius Caesar for aspiring to be a king, would have had the smallest scruple about crucifying a whole school of gladiators for attempting to escape from the most odious and degrading of all kinds of servitude.  None of those Virginian patriots, who vindicated their separation from the British empire by proclaiming it to be a selfevident truth that all men were endowed by the Creator with an unalienable right to liberty, would have had the smallest scruple about shooting any negro slave who had laid claim to that unalienable right.