of the country; and the volunteers are here to restore him. The Government has contended for the usurpation, and the people for the laws. His Majesty's late ministers imagined they had quelled the country when they had bought the newspapers; and they represented us as wild men, and our cause as visionary; and they pensioned a set of wretches to abuse both but we took little account of them or their proceedings, and we waited, and we watched, and we moved, as it were, on our native hills, with the minor remains of our parliamentary army, until that minority became Ireland. Let those ministers now go home, and congratulate their king on the redemption of his people. Did you imagine that those little parties whom three years ago you beheld in awkward squads parading in the streets,

should have now arrived to such distinction and effect? What was the cause; for it was not the sword of the volunteer, nor his muster, nor his spirit, nor his promptitude to put down accidental disturbance or public disorder, nor his own unblamed and distinguished deportinent. This was much; but there was more than this: the upper orders, the property, and the abilities of the country, formed with the volunteer; and the volunteer had sense enough to obey them. This united the Protestant with the Catholic, and the landed proprietor with the people. There was still more than this; there was a continence which confined the corps to limited and legitimate objects; there was a principle which preserved the corps from adultery with French politics; there was a good taste which guarded the corps from the affectation of such folly: this, all this, made them bold; for it kept them innocent, it kept them rational: no vulgar rant against England; no mysterious admiration of France; no crime to conceal, -no folly to be ashamed of. They were what they professed to be; and that was nothing less than the society asserting her liberty, according to the frame of the British constitution, her inheritance to be enjoyed in perpetual connexion with the British empire.

I do not mean to say that there were not divers violent and unseemly resolutions; the immensity of the means was inseparable from the excess.

Such are the great works of nature: such is the sea; but, like the sea, the

waste and excesses were lost in the advantage: and now, having given a parliament to the people, the volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the people to Parliament, and thus close, specifically and majestically, a great work, which will place them above censure and above panegyric. These associations, like other institutions, will perish: they will perish with the occasion that gave them being, and the gratitude of their country will write their epitaph, and say, "This phenomenon, the departed volunteer, justified only by the occasion, the birth of spirit and grievances, with some alloy of public evil, did more public good to Ireland than all her institutions; he restored the liberties of his country, and thus from the grave he answers his enemies." Connected by freedom as well as by allegiance, the two nations, Great Britain and Ireland, form a constitutional confederacy as well as one empire; the crown is one link, the constitution another; and, in my mind, the latter link is the most powerful.

You can get a king any where, but England is the only country with whom you can participate a free constitution. This makes England your natural connexion, and her king your natural as well as your legal sovereign: this is a connexion, not as Lord Coke has idly said, not as Judge Blackstone has foolishly said, not as other judges have ignorantly said, by conquest; but, as Molyneux has said, and as I now say, by compact; and that compact is a free constitution. Suffer me now to state some of the things essential to that free constitution; they are as follows: the independency of the Irish Parliament; the exclusion of the British Parliament from any authority in this realm; the restoration of the Irish judicature, and the exclusion of that of Great Britain. As to the perpetual mutiny bill, it must be more than limited; it must be effaced; that bill must fall, or the constitution cannot stand; that bill was originally limited by this House to two years, and it returned from England without the clause of limitation. What! a bill making the army independent of Parliament, and perpetual! I protested against it then, I have struggled with it since, and I am now come to destroy this great enemy of my country. The perpetual mutiny-bill must vanish out of the statute book; the excellent tract of

Molyneux was burned; it was not answered; and its flame illumined posterity. This evil paper shall be burned, but burned like a felon, that its execution may be a peace-offering to the people, and that a declaration of right may be planted on its guilty ashes; a new mutiny-bill must be formed after the manner of England, and a declaration of right put in the front of it.

§ 37. From Mr. GRATTAN's Speech on the

Sale of Peerages in Ireland.

I propose three questions for the right honourable gentleman's consideration: First, Is not the sale of peerages illegal? Second, Is it not a high misdemeanor and impeachable offence? Third, Whether a contract to purchase seats for persons named by the ministers of the Crown, with the money arising from the sale of the peerage, is not in itself an illegal and impeachable transaction, and a great aggravation of the other misdemeanors?

I wait for an answer. Does the right honourable gentleman continue in his seat? Then he admits these transactions to be great and flagrant breaches of the law. No lawyer I find so old and hardy, so young and desperate, as to deny it. Thus it appears that the administration of this country, by the acknowledgment of their own lawyers, have, in a high degree, broken the laws of the land. I will now discuss the nature of transactions admitted to be illegal; I know the prerogative of conferring honours has been held a frugal way of rewarding merit; but I dwell not on the loss of any collateral advantages by the abuse of that prerogative, but on the loss of the essence of the power itself, no longer a means of exalting, and now become an instrument of disgrace. I will expostulate with His Excellency on this subject; I will bring him to an eminence, from whence he may survey the people of this island. Is there, my lord, a man of all who pass under your eye, one man whom you can exalt by any title you may think to confer? You may create a confusion in names, or you may cast a veil over families, but honour, that sacred gem, you have cast in the dirt! I do not ask you merely, whether there is any man in the island whom

you can raise? but I ask you, is there any man whom you would not disgrace, by attempting to give him title, except such a man as would exalt you by the acceptance---some man whose hereditary or personal pretensions would rescue his name and dignity from the apparent blemish and ridicule cast on him by a grant from those hands to whom His Majesty has most unfortunately abandoned, in Ireland, the reins of government.

The mischief does not go merely to the credit, but may affect the existence of the nobility.

Our ministry, no doubt, condemn the National Assembly, in extinguishing the nobility of the country, and I dare say they will talk very scrupulously and very plausibly on that subject. They certainly have not extinguished the nobility of Ireland, but they have (as far as they could) attempted to disgrace them, and by so doing, have attempted to lay the seeds of their extinction. The Irish ministry have acted with more apparent moderation; but the French democracy have acted with more apparent consistency. The French democracy have, at one blow, struck from the nobility, power, perquisite, and rank. The Irish ministry have attempted to strike off honour and authority, and propose to leave them their powers and their privileges. The Irish ministry, after attempting to render their honours as saleable as the seats of justice were in France at the most unregenerated period of her monarchy, propose to send them abroad, to exact deference from the people as hereditary legislators, hereditary counsellors to the King, and hereditary judges of the land; and if hereafter any attempt should be made on our order of peerage, look to your ministry, they are the cause-they-they---they who have attempted, without success, but with matchless perseverance, to make the peerage mischievous, and, therefore, are guilty of an eventual attempt to declare it useless.

Such a minister is but a pioneer to the Leveller; he composes a part of his army, and marches in the van, and demolishes all the moral, constitutional, and political obstructions of principle and purity, and all the moral causes that would support authority, rank, and subordination.

Such a minister goes before the Leveller,

like sin preceding the shadow of death, shedding her poisons and distilling her influence, and preparing the nectar she touches for mortality. I do not say, that such a minister with his own hands strips the foliage off the tree of nobility. No; he is the early blight, that comes to the island to wither your honours in the first blast of popular breath, and so to scatter, that at last the whole leaveage of nobility may descend.

This minister, he does not come to the foundations of the House of Lords with his pick-axe, nor does he store all their vaults with trains of gunpowder. He is an enemy of a different sort. He does not purpose to blow up the Houses of Parliament; he only endeavours to corrupt the institutions, and he only undermines the moral props of opinion and authority; he only endeavours to taint nobility; he sells your Lords and he buys your Commons. The tree of nobility ;---that it may flourish for ever, and stand the blight of ministers and the blast of popular fury, that it may remain on its own hill rejoicing, and laugh to scorn that enemy, which in the person of the minister of the Crown, has gone against the nobles of the land---This is my earnest prayer.--That they may survive, survive to give counsel to those very ministers, and perhaps, to pronounce judgment upon them. But if ever the axe should go into that forest; if, on the track of the merchant men, in the shape of the minister, the political woodman, in the shape of the Leveller, should follow; if the sale of peerage, as exercised by the present minister, becoming the ordinary resource of government, should provoke a kindred extreme, and give birth to a race of men as unprincipled and desperate in one extreme as they are in the other, we shall then feel it our duty to resist such an effort; and as we now resist the ministers' attempts to dishonour, so shall we then resist the consequence of his crimes--projects to extinguish the nobility.

In the mean time, to prevent such a catastrophe, it is necessary to destroy such a practice, and, therefore, necessary to punish, or remove, or intimidate, and check your ministers.

I would not be understood to speak now of a figurative sale of honours; I am speaking of an actual one in the most literal sense of the word. I know the grants of honours have been at certain

times made for influence distinct from pretensions; but not argent comptant, the stock purse. It is not title for influence, but title for money to buy influence. You have carried it to the last step, and in that step have gone beyond the most unscrupulous of your predecessors; they may have abused the prerogative, but you have broken the laws. Your contract has been what a court of law would condemn for its illegality, and a court of equity for its turpitude.

The ministers have endeavoured to defile the source of honour; they have also attempted to pollute the stream of justice. The sale of peerage is the sale of a judicial employment, which cannot be sold without breach of an express act of Parliament,---the act of Richard II. and Edward VI.

I know the judicial power is only incidental to peerage, but the sale is not the less against the spirit of the act; indeed, it is the greatest possible offence against the spirit of the act, inasmuch as the judi cial power in this case is final, and comprehends all the judgments and decrees in all the courts of law and equity.

If I am injured in an inferior court, I can bear it; it is not without remedy. But there, where every thing is to be finally corrected; where the public is to be protected and rescued from the vindictive ignorance of a judge, or the little driving, arbitrary genius of a minister; the last oracle of all the laws, and the first fountain of counsel, and one great constituent of the legislature; to attempt to make that great repository a market; to erect at the door of the House of Lords the stall of the minister, where he and his friends should exercise their calling, and carry on such an illicit and shocking trade. That a minister should have cast out of his heart all respect for human institutions so far, as to attempt to post himself at the door of that chamber, the most illustrious, select, and ancient of all institutions we know of; to post himself there with his open palm, and to admit all who would pay for seats.

Is this the man who is to teach the Irish a respect for the laws, and to inculcate the blessings of the British constitution?

History is not wanting in instances of gross abuses of the prerogative in the disposal of the peerage; the worst ministers perhaps have attempted it; but I will as