gyrics on himself. I will interrupt him, and say, Sir, you are much mistaken if you think that your talents have been as great as your life has been reprehensible; you began your parliamentary career with an acrimony and personality which could have been justified only by a supposition of virtue: after a rank and clamorous opposition you became on a sudden silent; you were silent for seven years: you were silent on the greatest questions, and you were silent for money! In 1773, while a negotiation was pending to sell your talents and your turbulence, you absconded from your duty in parliament, you forsook your law of Poynings, you forsook the questions of economy, and abandoned all the old themes of your former declamation; you were not at that period to be found in the House; you were seen, like a guilty spirit, haunting the lobby of the House of Commons, watching the moment in which the question should be put, that you might vanish; you were descried with a criminal anxiety, retiring from the scenes of your past glory; or you were perceived coasting the upper benches of this House like a bird of prey, with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note, meditating to pounce on its quarry: -these ways, they were not the ways of honour, you practised pending a negotiation which was to end either in your sale or your sedition : the former taking place, you supported the rankest measures that ever came before Parliament; the embargo of 1776, for instance. fatal embargo, that breach of law, and ruin of commerce!" You supported the unparalleled profusion and jobbing of Lord Harcourt's scandalous ministry-the address to support the American war—the other address to send 4,000 men, which you had yourself declared to be necessary for the defence of Ireland, to fight against the liberties of America, to which you had declared yourself a friend ;—you, Sir, who delight to utter execrations against the American commissioners of 1778, on account of their hostility to America ;-you, Sir, who manufacture stage thunder against Mr. Eden, for his anti-American principles;-you, Sir, whom it pleases to chant a hymn to the immortal Hamden ;-you, Sir, approved of the tyranny exercised against America;—and you, Sir, voted 4,000 Irish troops to cut the throats of the Americans fighting for their freedom, fighting for your freedom, fighting for the great principle, liberty; but you found, at last (and this should be an eternal lesson to men of your craft and cunning), that the King had only dishonoured you; the Court had bought, but would not trust you; and having voted for the worst measures, you remained, for seven years, the creature of salary, without the confidence of Government. Mortified at the discovery, and stung by disappointment, you betake yourself to the sad expe

dients of duplicity; you try the sorry game of a trimmer in your progress to the acts of an incendiary; you give no honest support either to the Government or the people; you, at the most critical period of their existence, take no part, you sign no non-consumption agreement, you are no volunteer, you oppose no perpetual mutiny bill, no altered sugar bill; you declare, that you lament that the declaration of right should have been brought forward; and observing, with regard to prince and people, the most impartial treachery and desertion, you justify the suspicion of your Sovereign, by betraying the Government as you had sold the people: until, at last, by this hollow conduct, and for some other steps, the result of mortified ambition, being dismissed, and another person put in your place, you fly to the ranks of the volunteers, and canvass for mutiny; you announce that the country was ruined by other men during that period in which she had been sold by you. Your logic is, that the repeal of a declaratory law is not the repeal of a law at all, and the effect of that logic is, an English act affecting to emancipate Ireland, by exercising over her the legislative authority of the British Parliament. Such has been your conduct, and at such conduct every order of your fellow-subjects have a right to exclaim! The merchant may say to you the constitutionalist may say to you-the American may say to you-and I, I now say, and say to your beard, Sir-you are not an honest man.

Mr. Flood rose to reply, but after having proceeded some length in his defence, he fell so much out of order, that the Speaker interfered. He declared how much pain he had suffered in permitting this contest to proceed, and that nothing but the calls of the House, to hear the two members, should have made him sit so long silent. He requested Mr. Flood would sit down, with which request he complied, and shortly after retired. The Speaker issued his warrant to apprehend the parties, and Mr. Flood was shortly after taken into custody. The House then directed that search should be made for Mr. Grattan; and the parties were bound over. It was then moved that the motion of Sir Henry Cavendish be taken into consideration, immediately after a report be made from the committee of accounts; and it passed in the affirmative.

COMMERCIAL PROPOSITIONS.

12th August, 1785.

HOWEVER, lest certain glosses should seem to go unanswered, I shall, for the sake of argument, waive past settlements, and combat the

reasoning of the English resolutions, the address, His Majesty's answer, and the reasoning of this day. It is here said, that the laws respecting commerce and navigation should be similar, and inferred, that Ireland should subscribe the laws of England on those subjects; that is, the same law, the same legislature: but this argument goes a great deal too far: it goes to the army, for the mutiny bill should be the same; it was endeavoured to be extended to the collection of your revenue, and is in train to be extended to your taxes; it goes to the extinction of the most invaluable part of your parliamentary capacity; it is a union, an incipient and a creeping union; a virtual union, establishing one will in the general concerns of commerce and navigation, and reposing that will in the Parliament of Great Britain; a union where our Parliament preserves its existence after it has lost its authority, and our people are to pay for a parliamentary establishment, without any proportion of parliamentary representation. In opposing the right honourable gentleman's bill, I consider myself as opposing a union in limine, and that argument for union which makes similarity of law and community of interest (reason strong for the freedom of Ireland!) a pretence for a condition which would be dissimilarity of law, because extinction of constitution, and therefore hostility, not community of interest; I ask, on what experience is this argument founded? Have you, ever since your redemption, refused to preserve a similarity of law in trade and navigation? Have you not followed Great Britain in all her changes of the act of navigation, during the whole of that unpalatable business, the American war? Have you not excluded the cheap produce of other plantations, in order that Irish poverty might give a monopoly to the dear produce of British colonies? Have you not made a better use of your liberty than Great Britain did of her power? But I have an objection to this argument, stronger even than its want of foundation in reason and experiment; I hold it to be nothing less than an intolerance of the parliamentary constitution of Ireland, a declaration that the full and free external legislation of the Irish Parliament is incompatible with the British empire. I do acknowledge, that by your external power you might discompose the harmony of empire, and I add, that, by your power over the purse, you might dissolve the state: but to the latter, you owe your existence in the constitution, and to the former, your authority and station in the empire: this argument, therefore, rests the connection upon a new and a false principle, goes directly against the root of Parliament, and is not a difficulty to be accommodated, but an error to be eradicated; and if any body of men can still think that the Irish constitution is incompatible with the

British empire, doctrine which I abjure as sedition against the connection; but if any body of men are justified in thinking that the Irish constitution is incompatible with the British empire, perish the empire! live the constitution! Reduced by this false dilemma to take a part, my second wish is the British empire, my first wish and bounden duty is the liberty of Ireland; but we are told this imperial power is not only necessary for England, but safe for Ireland.

What is the present question? what but the abuse of this very power of regulating the trade of Ireland by the British Parliament, excluding you and including herself by virtue of the same words of the same act of navigation? And what was the promovent cause of this arrangement? what but the power you are going to surrender-the distinct and independent external authority of the Irish Parliament, competent to question that misconstruction? What is the remedy now proposed?-the evil. Go back to the Parliament of England; I ask again, what were the difficulties in the way of your eleven propositions? what but the jealousy of the British manufacturers on the subject of trade? And will you make them your parliament, and that too for ever, and that too on the subject of their jealousy, and in the moment they displayed it! I will suppose that jealousy realized; that you rival them in some market abroad, and that they petition their Parliament to impose a regulation which shall affect a tonnage which you have, and Great Britain has not; how would you then feel your situation, when you should be obliged to register all this? And how would you feel your degradation, when you should see your own manufacturers pass you by as a cypher in the constitution, and deprecate their ruin at the bar of a foreign parliament! Whence the American war? Whence the Irish restrictions? Whence the misconstruction of the act of navigation? Whence but from the evil of suffering one country to regulate the trade and navigation of another, and of instituting, under the idea of general protectress, a proud domination, which sacrifices the interest of the whole to the ambition of a part, and arms the little passions of the monopolist with the sovereign potency of an Imperial Parliament: for great nations, when cursed with unnatural sway, follow but their nature when they invade ; and human wisdom has not better provided for human safety, than by limiting the principles of human power. The surrender of legislature has been linked to cases that not unfrequently take place between two equal nations, covenanting to suspend, in particular cases, their respective legislative powers for mutual benefit; thus Great Britain and Portugal agree to suspend their legislative power in favour of the wine of the one, and the woollen of the other; but if Portugal had gone

farther, and agreed to subscribe the laws of England, this covenant had not been a treaty, but conquest; so Great Britain and Ireland may covenant not to raise high duties on each other's manufactures; but if Ireland goes farther, and covenants to subscribe British law, this is not a mutual suspension of the exercise of legislative power, but a transfer of the power itself from one country to another, to be exercised by another hand; such covenant is not reciprocity of trade; it is a surrender of the government of your trade, inequality of trade, and inequality of constitution. I speak, however, as if such transfer could take place; but in fact it could not: any arrangement so covenanting is a mere nullity; it could not bind you, still less could it bind your successors; for a man is not omnipotent over himself, neither are your parliaments omnipotent over themselves, to accomplish their own destruction, and propagate death to their successors; there is in these cases a superior relationship to our respective creators— God and the community, which, in the instance of the individual, arrests the hand of suicide, and in that of the political body, stops the act of surrender, and makes man the means of propagation, and parliament the organ to continue liberty, not the engine to destroy it. However, though the surrender is void, there are two ways of attempting it; one, by a surrender in form, the other, by a surrender in substance; appointing another parliament your substitute, and consenting to be its register or stamp, by virtue of which to introduce the law and edict of another land; to clothe with the forms of your law, foreign deliberations, and to preside over the disgraceful ceremony of your own abdicated authority; both methods are equally surrenders, and both are wholly void. I speak on principle, the principle on which you stand-your creation. We, the limited trustees of the delegated power, born for a particular purpose, limited to a particular time, and bearing an inviolable relationship to the people who sent us to parliament, cannot break that relationship, counteract that purpose, surrender, diminish, or derogate from those privileges we breathe but to preserve. Could the Parliament of England covenant to subscribe your laws? could she covenant that young Ireland should command, and old England should obey? If such a proposal to England were mockery, to Ireland it cannot be constitution. I rest on authority as well as principle-the authority on which the revolution rests. Mr. Locke, who, in his chapter on the abolition of government, says, "that the transfer of legislative power is the abolition of the state, not a transfer." Thus, I may congratulate this House and myself, that it is one of the blessings of the British constitution, that it cannot perish of rapid mortality, nor die in a day, like the men who should protect