Dear Abraham--What amuses me the most is to hear of the _indulgences_
which the Catholics have received, and their exorbitance in not being
satisfied with those indulgences: now if you complain to me that a
man is obtrusive and shameless in his requests, and that it is
impossible to bring him to reason, I must first of all hear the whole
of your conduct towards him; for you may have taken from him so much
in the first instance that, in spite of a long series of restitution,
a vast latitude for petition may still remain behind.
There is a village, no matter where, in which the inhabitants, on one
day in the year, sit down to a dinner prepared at the common expense:
by an extraordinary piece of tyranny, which Lord Hawkesbury would call
the wisdom of the village ancestors, the inhabitants of three of the
streets, about a hundred years ago, seized upon the inhabitants of the
fourth street, bound them hand and foot, laid them upon their backs,
and compelled them to look on while the rest were stuffing themselves
with beef and beer; the next year the inhabitants of the persecuted
street, though they contributed an equal quota of the expense, were
treated precisely in the same manner. The tyranny grew into a custom;
and, as the manner of our nature is, it was considered as the most
sacred of all duties to keep these poor fellows without their annual
dinner. The village was so tenacious of this practice, that nothing
could induce them to resign it; every enemy to it was looked upon as a
disbeliever in Divine Providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who
wished to succeed in his election had nothing to do but to represent
his antagonist as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition,
endanger his life, and throw the village into a state of the most
dreadful commotion. By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew to
be so well peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that their
oppressors, more afraid of injustice, were more disposed to be just.
At the next dinner they are unbound, the year after allowed to sit
upright, then a bit of bread and a glass of water; till at last, after
a long series of concessions, they are emboldened to ask, in pretty
plain terms, that they may be allowed to sit down at the bottom of the
table, and to fill their bellies as well as the rest. Forthwith a
general cry of shame and scandal: 'Ten years ago, were you not laid
upon your backs? Don't you remember what a great thing you thought it
to get a piece of bread? How thankful you were for cheese parings?
Have you forgotten that memorable era, when the lord of the manor
interfered to obtain for you a slice of the public pudding? And now,
with an audacity only equalled by your ingratitude, you have the
impudence to ask for knives and forks, and to request, in terms too
plain to be mistaken, that you may sit down to table with the rest,
and be indulged even with beef and beer: there are not more than half
a dozen dishes which we have reserved for ourselves; the rest has been
thrown open to you in the utmost profusion; you have potatoes, and
carrots, suet dumplings, sops in the pan, and delicious toast and
water in incredible quantities. Beef, mutton, lamb, pork, and veal are
ours; and if you were not the most restless and dissatisfied of human
beings, you would never think of aspiring to enjoy them.'
Is not this, my dainty Abraham, the very nonsense and the very insult
which is talked to and practised upon the Catholics? You are surprised
that men who have tasted of partial justice should ask for perfect
justice; that he who has been robbed of coat and cloak will not be
contented with the restitution of one of his garments. He would be a
very lazy blockhead if he were content, and I (who, though an
inhabitant of the village, have preserved, thank God, some sense of
justice) most earnestly counsel these half-fed claimants to persevere
in their just demands, till they are admitted to a more complete share
of a dinner for which they pay as much as the others; and if they see
a little attenuated lawyer squabbling at the head of their opponents,
let them desire him to empty his pockets, and to pull out all the
pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding which he has filched from the public
feast, to carry home to his wife and children.
You parade a great deal upon the vast concessions made by this country
to the Irish before the Union. I deny that any voluntary concession
was ever made by England to Ireland. What did Ireland ever ask that
was granted? What did she ever demand that was not refused? How did
she get her Mutiny Bill--a limited Parliament--a repeal of Poyning's
Law--a constitution? Not by the concessions of England, but by her
fears. When Ireland asked for all these things upon her knees, her
petitions were rejected with Percevalism and contempt; when she
demanded them with the voice of 60,000 armed men, they were granted
with every mark of consternation and dismay. Ask of Lord Auckland the
fatal consequences of trifling with such a people as the Irish. He
himself was the organ of these refusals. As secretary to the Lord
Lieutenant, the insolence and the tyranny of this country passed
through his hands. Ask him if he remembers the consequences. Ask him
if he has forgotten that memorable evening when he came down booted
and mantled to the House of Commons, when he told the House he was
about to set off for Ireland that night, and declared before God, if
he did not carry with him a compliance with all their demands, Ireland
was for ever lost to this country. The present generation have
forgotten this; but I have not forgotten it; and I know, hasty and
undignified as the submission of England then was, that Lord Auckland
was right, that the delay of a single day might very probably have
separated the two peoples for ever. The terms submission and fear are
galling terms when applied from the lesser nation to the greater; but
it is the plain historical truth, it is the natural consequence of
injustice, it is the predicament in which every country places itself
which leaves such a mass of hatred and discontent by its side. No
empire is powerful enough to endure it; it would exhaust the strength
of China, and sink it with all its mandarins and tea-kettles to the
bottom of the deep. By refusing them justice now when you are strong
enough to refuse them anything more than justice, you will act over
again, with the Catholics, the same scene of mean and precipitate
submission which disgraced you before America, and before the
volunteers of Ireland. We shall live to hear the Hampstead Protestant
pronouncing such extravagant panegyrics upon holy water, and paying
such fulsome compliments to the thumbs and offals of departed saints,
that parties will change sentiments, and Lord Henry Petty and Sam
Whitbread take a spell at No Popery. The wisdom of Mr. Fox was alike
employed in teaching his country justice when Ireland was weak, and
dignity when Ireland was strong. We are fast pacing round the same
miserable circle of ruin and imbecility. Alas! where is our guide?
You say that Ireland is a millstone about our necks; that it would be
better for us if Ireland were sunk at the bottom of the sea; that the
Irish are a nation of irreclaimable savages and barbarians. How often
have I heard these sentiments fall from the plump and thoughtless
squire, and from the thriving English shopkeeper, who has never felt
the rod of an Orange master upon his back. Ireland a millstone about
your neck! Why is it not a stone of Ajax in your hand? I agree with
you most cordially that, governed as Ireland now is, it would be a
vast accession of strength if the waves of the sea were to rise and
engulf her to-morrow. At this moment, opposed as we are to all the
world, the annihilation of one of the most fertile islands on the face
of the globe, containing five millions of human creatures, would be
one of the most solid advantages which could happen to this country. I
doubt very much, in spite of all the just abuse which has been
lavished upon Bonaparte, whether there is any one of his conquered
countries the blotting out of which would be as beneficial to him as
the destruction of Ireland would be to us: of countries I speak
differing in language from the French, little habituated to their
intercourse, and inflamed with all the resentments of a recently
conquered people. Why will you attribute the turbulence of our people
to any cause but the right--to any cause but your own scandalous
oppression? If you tie your horse up to a gate, and beat him cruelly,
is he vicious because he kicks you? If you have plagued and worried a
mastiff dog for years, is he mad because he flies at you whenever he
sees you? Hatred is an active, troublesome passion. Depend upon it,
whole nations have always some reason for their hatred. Before you
refer the turbulence of the Irish to incurable defects in their
character, tell me if you have treated them as friends and equals?
Have you protected their commerce? Have you respected their religion?
Have you been as anxious for their freedom as your own? Nothing of all
this. What then? Why you have confiscated the territorial surface of
the country twice over: you have massacred and exported her
inhabitants: you have deprived four-fifths of them of every civil
privilege: you have at every period made her commerce and manufactures
slavishly subordinate to your own: and yet the hatred which the Irish
bear to you is the result of an original turbulence of character, and
of a primitive, obdurate wildness, utterly incapable of civilisation.
The embroidered inanities and the sixth-form effusions of Mr. Canning
are really not powerful enough to make me believe this; nor is there
any authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ Church)
which could make it credible to me. I am sick of Mr. Canning. There is
not a 'ha'porth of bread to all this sugar and sack.' I love not the
cretaceous and incredible countenance of his colleague. The only
opinion in which I agree with these two gentlemen is that which they
entertain of each other. I am sure that the insolence of Mr. Pitt, and
the unbalanced accounts of Melville, were far better than the perils
of this new ignorance:--
Nonne fuit satiùs, tristes Amaryllidis iras
Atque superba pati fastidia? nonne Menalcan?
Quamvis ille _niger_?
In the midst of the most profound peace, the secret articles of the
Treaty of Tilsit, in which the destruction of Ireland is resolved
upon, induce you to rob the Danes of their fleet. After the expedition
sailed comes the Treaty of Tilsit, containing no article, public or
private, alluding to Ireland. The state of the world, you tell me,
justified us in doing this. Just God! do we think only of the state of
the world when there is an opportunity for robbery, for murder, and
for plunder; and do we forget the state of the world when we are
called upon to be wise, and good, and just? Does the state of the
world never remind us that we have four millions of subjects whose
injuries we ought to atone for, and whose affections we ought to
conciliate? Does the state of the world never warn us to lay aside our
infernal bigotry, and to arm every man who acknowledges a God, and can
grasp a sword? Did it never occur to this administration that they
might virtuously get hold of a force ten times greater than the force
of the Danish fleet? Was there no other way of protecting Ireland but
by bringing eternal shame upon Great Britain, and by making the earth
a den of robbers? See what the men whom you have supplanted would have
done. They would have rendered the invasion of Ireland impossible, by
restoring to the Catholics their long-lost rights: they would have
acted in such a manner that the French would neither have wished for
invasion nor dared to attempt it: they would have increased the
permanent strength of the country while they preserved its reputation
unsullied. Nothing of this kind your friends have done, because they
are solemnly pledged to do nothing of this kind; because, to tolerate
all religions, and to equalise civil rights to all sects, is to oppose
some of the worst passions of our nature--to plunder and to oppress is
to gratify them all. They wanted the huzzas of mobs, and they have for
ever blasted the fame of England to obtain them. Were the fleets of
Holland, France, and Spain destroyed by larceny? You resisted the
power of 150 sail of the line by sheer courage, and violated every
principle of morals from the dread of fifteen hulks, while the
expedition itself cost you three times more than the value of the
larcenous matter brought away. The French trample on the laws of God
and man, not for old cordage, but for kingdoms, and always take care
to be well paid for their crimes. We contrive, under the present
administration, to unite moral with intellectual deficiency, and to
grow weaker and worse by the same action. If they had any evidence of
the intended hostility of the Danes, why was it not produced? Why have
the nations of Europe been allowed to feel an indignation against this
country beyond the reach of all subsequent information? Are these
times, do you imagine, when we can trifle with a year of universal
hatred, dally with the curses of Europe, and then regain a lost
character at pleasure, by the parliamentary perspirations of the
Foreign Secretary, or the solemn asseverations of the pecuniary Rose?
Believe me, Abraham, it is not under such ministers as these that the
dexterity of honest Englishmen will ever equal the dexterity of French
knaves; it is not in their presence that the serpent of Moses will
ever swallow up the serpents of the magician.
Lord Hawkesbury says that nothing is to be granted to the Catholics
from fear. What! not even justice? Why not? There are four millions of
disaffected people within twenty miles of your own coast. I fairly
confess that the dread which I have of their physical power is with me
a very strong motive for listening to their claims. To talk of not
acting from fear is mere parliamentary cant. From what motive but
fear, I should be glad to know, have all the improvements in our
constitution proceeded? I question if any justice has ever been done
to large masses of mankind from any other motive. By what other
motives can the plunderers of the Baltic suppose nations to be
governed in their intercourse _with each other_? If I say, Give this
people what they ask because it is just, do you think I should get ten
people to listen to me? Would not the lesser of the two Jenkinsons be
the first to treat me with contempt? The only true way to make the
mass of mankind see the beauty of justice is by showing to them, in
pretty plain terms, the consequences of injustice. If any body of
French troops land in Ireland, the whole population of that country
will rise against you to a man, and you could not possibly survive
such an event three years. Such, from the bottom of my soul, do I
believe to be the present state of that country; and so far does it
appear to me to be impolitic and unstatesman-like to conceed anything
to such a danger, that if the Catholics, in addition to their present
just demands, were to petition for the perpetual removal of the said
Lord Hawkesbury from his Majesty's councils, I think, whatever might
be the effect upon the destinies of Europe, and however it might
retard our own individual destruction, that the prayer of the petition
should be instantly complied with. Canning's crocodile tears should
not move me; the hoops of the maids of honour should not hide him. I
would tear him from the banisters of the back stairs, and plunge him
in the fishy fumes of the dirtiest of all his Cinque Ports.