to confirm property, and to restore freedom. The nation begins to form-we are moulding into a people; freedom asserted, property secured, and the army, a mercenary band, likely to be dependent on your Parliament, restrained by law. Never was such a revolution accomplished in so short a time, and with such public tranquillity. In what situation would those men, who call themselves friends of constitution and government, have left you? They would have left you without a title (as they stole it) to your estates, without an assertion of your constitution, or a law for your army; and this state of private and public insecurity, this anarchy, raging in the kingdom for eighteen months, these mock-moderators would have had the presumption to call peace.

The King has no other title to his crown than that which you have to your liberty. Both are founded, the throne and your freedom, upon the right vested in the subject to resist by arms, notwithstanding their oaths of allegiance, any authority attempting to impose acts of power as laws: whether that authority be one man or a host, the second James, or the British Parliament, every argument for the House of Hanover is equally an argument for the liberties of Ireland. The Act

of Settlement is an Act of rebellion, or the sixth of George 1. an Act of usurpation. I do not refer to doubtful history, but to living record, to common charters, to the interpretation England has put on those charters (an interpretation made not by words only, but crowned by arms), to the revolution she has formed upon them, to the King she has established, and, above all, to the oath of allegiance solemnly plighted to the House of Stuart, and afterwards set aside in the instance of a grave and moral people, absolved by virtue of those very charters and as anything less than liberty is inadequate to Ireland, so is it dangerous to Great Britain. We are too near the British nation, we are too conversant with her history,

1 An Act of the British Parliament settling the line of succession to the British Crown on the descendants of the Princess Sophia of Hanover, to the exclusion of the Stuarts.

we are too much fired by her example, to be anything less than equals: anything less, we should be her bitterest enemies. An enemy to that power which smote us with her mace, and to that constitution from whose blessings we are excluded, to be ground, as we have been, by the British nation, bound by her Parliament, plundered by her Crown, threatened by her enemies, and insulted with her protection, while we return thanks for her condescension, in a system of meanness and misery which has expired in our determination and in her magnanimity.

That there are precedents against us I allow,-acts of power I would call them, not precedents; and I answer the English pleading such precedents, as they answered their kings when they urged precedents against the liberty of England. Such things are the tyranny of one side, the weakness of the other, and the law of neither. We will not be bound by them; or rather, in the words of the Declaration of Right, no doing, judgment, or proceeding to the contrary, shall be brought into precedent or example. Do not then tolerate a power, the power of the British Government, over this land, which has no foundation in necessity, or utility, or empire, or the laws of England, or the laws of Ireland, or the laws of nature, or the laws of God. Do not suffer that power which banished your manufactures, dishonoured your peerage, and stopped the growth of your people. Do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woollens, or an import of sugar, and suffer that power which has thus withered the land to have existence in your pusillanimity. Do not send the people to their own resolves for liberty, passing by the tribunals of justice, and the high court of Parliament; neither imagine that, by any formation of apology, you can palliate such a commission to your hearts, still less to your children, who will sting you in your grave for interfering between them and their Maker, and robbing them of an immense occasion, and losing an opportunity which you did not create, and can never restore.

Hereafter, when these things shall be history, your age of

thraldom, your sudden resurrection, commercial redress, and miraculous armament,1 shall the historian stop at liberty, and observe that here the principal men amongst us were found wanting, were awed by a weak ministry, bribed by an empty treasury; and, when liberty was within their grasp, and her temple opened its folding-doors, fell down, and were prostituted at the threshold.

I might, as a constituent, come to your bar and demand my liberty. I do call upon you by the laws of the land and their violation; by the instructions of eighteen counties, by the arms, inspiration, and providence of the present moment— tell us the rule by which we shall go; assert the law of Ireland; declare the liberty of the land! I will not be answered by a public lie, in the shape of an amendment; nor, speaking of the subjects' freedom, am I to hear of faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe in this our island, in common with my fellow-subjects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unless it be to break your chain and contemplate your glory. I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cottager in Ireland has a chain clanking to his rags. He may be naked, he shall not be in irons. And I do see the time at hand; the spirit is gone forth; the Declaration of Right is planted; and though great men should fall off, yet the cause shall live; and though he who utters this should die, yet the immortal fire shall outlast the humble organ who conveys it, and the breath of liberty, like the word of the holy man, will not die with the prophet, but survive him.

A reference to the rapid formation of the volunteer corps.

In 1783

In 1792

HOMAS, LORD ERSKINE, was the third son of David Henry Erskine, Earl of Buchan, and was born about 1750. He was educated at Edinburgh High School and St Andrews University, went to sea for four years as a midshipman, and afterwards entered the Royals, or 1st Regiment of Foot. At the age of twenty-six he became a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and about the same time began to study law at Lincoln's Inn. In 1778 he was called to the bar, and was at once successful. he entered Parliament as member for Portsmouth. he defended Thomas Paine in his prosecution for the second part of his Rights of Man. He was for this action deprived of his office as Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales. He took a very prominent part in the trials of Hardy, Tooke, and others, for high treason in 1794. He was restored to his office of Attorney-General in 1802, and on the death of Pitt in 1806 he was promoted to the dignity of Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. On the dissolution of the ministry with which he was connected, he retired with a pension. Erskine died in 1823.

FROM A SPEECH AGAINST THOMAS WILLIAMS FOR THE PUBLICATION OF PAINE'S AGE OF REASON.'1

I call for reverence to the Sacred Scriptures, not from their merits, unbounded as they are, but from their authority in a 1 Before Lord Kenyon and a special jury on the 24th of July 1797.

Christian country; not from the obligations of conscience, but from the rules of law. For my own part, gentlemen, I have been ever deeply devoted to the truths of Christianity, and my firm belief in the holy Gospel is by no means owing to the prejudices of education, though I was religiously educated by the best of parents, but arises from the fullest and most continued reflections of my riper years and understanding. It forms at this moment the great consolation of a life which, as a shadow, must pass away; and without it, indeed, I should consider my long course of health and prosperity, perhaps too long and uninterrupted to be good for any man, only as the dust which the wind scatters, and rather as a snare than as a blessing. Much, however, as I wish to support the authority of the Scriptures, from a reasoned consideration of them, I shall repress that subject for the present. But if the defence shall be, as I have suspected, to bring them at all into argument or question, I shall then fulfil a duty which I owe not only to the Court, as counsel for the prosecution, but to the public, to state what I feel and know concerning the evidence of that religion which is reviled without being examined, and denied without being understood.

I am well aware that, by the communications of a free press, all the errors of mankind, from age to age, have been dissipated and dispelled; and I recollect that the world, under the banners of reformed Christianity, has struggled through persecution to the noble eminence on which it stands at this moment, shedding the blessings of humanity and science upon the nations of the earth. It may be asked by what means the Reformation would have been effected, if the books of the Reformers had been suppressed, and the errors of condemned and exploded superstitions had been supported as unquestionable by the State, founded upon those very superstitions formerly, as it is at present upon the doctrines of the Established Church, or how, upon such principles, any reformation, civil or religious, can in future be effected? The solution is easy. Let us examine what are the genuine principles of the liberty of the