up a part to preserve the whole, that we must leave both our liberty and property unmortgaged to posterity. If I am called upon to pay a shilling to preserve a pound, this is intelligible; but if I am called upon twenty times successively for my shilling, it is ridiculous to tell me of giving up a part for the preservation of the whole. This will not do; and, as a worthy baronet said on another occasion, "if it is so often repeated, it comes to be no joke."

Sir, this kind of paradoxical insult can not long be endured. It will not do to tell us that sending millions of money to Germany for the defense of this country is true economy; that to lop off the most valuable of our liberties is to preserve the constitution; that not to pay its lawful creditors is to support the credit of the bank; and to introduce a general disclosure of income is to protect property. This is the last stage of such delusion. The tricks have been too often repeated to elude the most inattentive observation, While the affairs of this country continue in the same hands, they can not be administered wisely or well. The country can not have confidence in a system always unsuccessful, now hopeless; and the dismissal of ministers must be the preliminary step to any vigor of system, any prospect of peace.

SHERIDAN.

XVII. JUSTICE TO ROMAN CATHOLICS.

On moving for a committee on the Roman Catholic claims, February 28, 1821. SIR, on the part of the Roman Catholics, I will be bold to say, that they harbor no principle of hostility to our Establishment. What have they said or done, since the period of the Revolution, to show that they mean to touch the Establishment? "Let them swear what they will," it is said, "the Catholics must break their oaths, and our Establishment must be endangered." The right honorable gentleman maintains, that he is authorized by his views to exclude them from this State on principles that would make them unworthy of any State.

Sir, I cannot find, in the large volume of human nature, any principle which calls upon the Roman Catholic to subvert that State by whose laws he is protected, merely that the heads of his priests may be decorated with a miter! And the right honorable gentleman must excuse me if I say, that he equally mistakes the institutions of man and the principles of human action. The Catholic does not indulge the chimerical notion of heaving the British constitution from its basis, that his priest may wear lawn sleeves and a miter. If, however, he is excluded from the privi

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leges of the State merely on account of his religion; if he is made an invidious exception in a country which permits the talents and virtues of all other men to advance them to the highest honors; and if this exception extend to his posterity,-"nati natōrum et qui nascentur ab illis," he will indeed have a suffi·cient motive to aim at the destruction of that State which heaps upon him only so heavy a load of injustice.

Sir, I would unite the Catholic by every affection and every good feeling of his nature, by every motive that can operate upon his heart and head, by every obligation that can bind his conscience, and every argument that can convince his understanding; not so much by adding to his power, as by removing every offensive exclusion, every unworthy distinction. I do not propose here to strike the shackle from his limbs, for he is free; but to remove the brand from his forehead, for he is stigmatized. I would not have him a marked man and a plotting sectary, but would raise him to the proudest rank that man can attain, to the rights and privileges of a free-born subject. Do not, I entreat you, as sincere friends to the Protestant establishment, do not reject this appeal for justice and grace. Do not drive your Roman Catholic brother from your bar a discontented sectary. Do not tell him who wishes to be a friend, that he is, and ought to be, an enemy.

W. C. PLUNKETT.

XVIIL-THE DELIVERANCE OF EUROPE.

THAT we have objects, great and momentous objects, in our view, there is no man that must not feel. I can have no difficulty in declaring that the most complete and desirable termination of the contest would be the deliverance of Europe. I am told, indeed, that there are persons who affect not to understand this phrase; who think there is something confused, something involved, something of a studied ambiguity and concealment, in it. I can not undertake to answer for other gentlemen's powers of comprehension. The map of Europe is before them. I can only say that I do not admire that man's intellect, and I do not envy that man's feelings, who can look over that map without gathering some notion of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy that man's feelings who can behold the sufferings of Switzerland, and who derives from that sight no idea of what is meant by the deliverance of Europe. I do not envy the feelings of that man who can look without emotion at Italy, plundered, insulted, trampled upon, exhausted, covered with ridicule, and horror, and devastation, who can look at all this,

and be at a loss to guess what is meant by the deliverance of Europe! As little do I envy the feelings of that man who can view the people of the Netherlands driven into insurrection, and struggling for their freedom against the heavy hand of a merci less tyranny, without entertaining any suspicion of what may be the sense of the word deliverance!

Does such a man contemplate Holland groaning under arbitrary oppressions and exactions? Does he turn his eyes to Spain trembling at the nod of a foreign master? And does the word deliverance still sound unintelligibly in his ear? Has he heard of the rescue and salvation of Naples by the appearance and the triumphs of the British fleet? Does he know that the monarchy of Naples maintains its existence at the sword's point? And is his understanding and is his heart still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe?

Sir, that we shall succeed in effecting this general deliverance, I do not pretend to affirm. That in no possible case we should lay down our arms and conclude a peace before it is fully effected, I do not mean to argue. But that this is the object which we ought to have in view, even if we look to our own safety only,

that of this we ought to accomplish as much as our means, our exertions, our opportunities, will allow, I do most anxiously contend. If circumstances should unhappily arise to make the attainment of the object hopeless, it will be time enough when they do arise to give up the hopes of attaining it. But do not let us run before misfortune; do not let us presume disappointment, and anticipate the necessity of disgrace.

GEORGE CANNING.

XIX. THE VOTE BY BALLOT.

-

SIR, it is said that the morals of the people would be affected by clandestine voting. We are told that it would conduce to the propagation of the most pernicious habits; that falsehood and dissimulation would be its natural results; men would make promises which they had no intention of keeping, and suspicion and mistrust. would arise where confidence and reliance now happily prevail. Sir, I am persuaded that promises spontaneously made, flowing from a free and unbiased volition, would be observed under the ballot as faithfully as they now are; and, with regard to promises purchased from corruption or wrung from fear, they belong to that class of engagements of whose inchoate depravity the profligate performance is the infamous consummation.

*Pronounced in'ko-ate.

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I am well aware that, generally speaking, citations from the writers of antiquity are little applicable to our system of government and our code of morality. The opinions of men who lived two thousand years ago have little weight; but there is a passage with reference to the morality of the ballot, in a speech of the great Athenian, which I have never seen quoted, so forcible and so true that I shall be excused for adverting to it:

"If," says Demosthenes, in his speech on the False Embassy, addressing an assembly of five hundred judges who were to vote by ballot, "if there be any man here sufficiently unfortunate to have been betrayed into a corrupt engagement to vote against his conscience and his country, let him bear in mind that to the fulfillment of that promise he is not bound; that those with whom he has entered into that profligate undertaking will have no cognizance of its performance, but that there is a divinity above us who will take cognizance of his thoughts, and know whether he shall have fulfilled that duty to his country which is paramount to every other obligation. Your vote is secret. You have nothing to apprehend; for safety is secured to you by the wisest regulation which your lawgivers ever yet laid down."

To all times and to all countries the principle thus powerfully expressed is appropriate. A dishonorable contract is void, and to the discharge of a great trust impunity should be secured. The franchise, you often tell us, is a trust granted; but for whom? If for the proprietor of the soil, if for the benefit of the landlord, if it is in him indeed that the beneficial interest is vested, by all means let the vote be public, and let the real owner of the vote have the fullest opportunity of knowing with what fidelity the offices of servitude have been performed; but if the franchise is a trust for the benefit of the community, and if the publicity of its exercise conduces to its violation, then, in the name of common consistency, do not insist upon our adherence to that system of voting by which the object you have, or ought to have, most of all at heart, is so manifestly counteracted.

SHIEL.

XX. THE IRISH DISTURBANCE BILL.

I Do not rise to fawn or cringe to this house; I do not rise to supplicate you to be merciful towards the nation to which I belong - towards a nation which, though subject to England, yet is distinct from it. It is a distinct nation. It has been treated as such by this country, as may be proved by history, and by seven hundred years of tyranny, I call upon this house, as you value

the liberty of England, not to allow the present nefarious bill to pass. In it are involved the liberties of England, the liberty of the press, and of every other institution dear to Englishmen. Against the bill I protest in the name of the Irish people, and in the face of heaven. I treat with scorn the puny and pitiful assertions that grievances are not to be complained of, that our redress is not to be agitated; for, in such cases, remonstrances can not be too strong, agitation can not be too violent, to show to the world with what injustice our fair claims are met, and under what tyranny the people suffer.

There are two frightful clauses in this bill. The one which does away with trial by jury, and which I have called upon you to baptize. You call it a court-martial—a mere nickname; I stigmatize it as a revolutionary tribunal. What, in the name of heaven, is it, if it is not a revolutionary tribunal? It annihilates the trial by jury; it drives the judge from his bench, the man who, from experience, could weigh the nice and delicate points of a case; who could discriminate between the straightforward testimony and the suborned evidence; who could see, plainly and readily, the justice or injustice of the accusation. It turns out this man, who is free, unshackled, unprejudiced, who has no previous opinions to control the clear exercise of his duty. You do away with that which is more sacred than the throne itself; that for which your king reigns, your lords deliberate, your commons assemble.

If ever I doubted before of the success of our agitation for repeal, this bill, this infamous bill, the way in which it has been received by the house, the manner in which its opponents have been treated, the personalities to which they have been subjected, the yells with which one of them has this night been greeted,all these things dissipate my doubts, and tell me of its complete and early triumph. Do you think those yells will be forgotten? Do you suppose their echo will not reach the plains of my injured and insulted country?—that they will not be whispered in her green valleys, and heard from her lofty hills? O, they will be heard there; yes, and they will not be forgotten! The youth of Ireland will bound with indignation; they will say, "We are eight millions; and you treat us thus, as though we were no more to your country than the isle of Guernsey or of Jersey!"

I have done my duty. I stand acquitted to my conscience and my country. I have opposed this measure throughout; and I now protest against it as harsh, oppressive, uncalled for, unjust; as establishing an infamous precedent by retaliating crime against crime; as tyrannous, cruelly and vindictively tyrannous. DANIEL O'CONNELL,