fundamental, and what not. However, there is a distinction between them,
authorized by the writers on jurisprudence, and recognized in some of
our statutes. I admit the acts of King William and Queen Anne to be
fundamental, but they are not the only fundamental laws. The law called
_Magna Charta_, by which it is provided that "no man shall be disseised
of his liberties and free customs but by the judgment of his peers or
the laws of the land," (meaning clearly, for some proved crime tried and
adjudged,) I take to be _a fundamental law._ Now, although this Magna
Charta, or some of the statutes establishing it, provide that that law
shall be perpetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, yet I
cannot go so far as to deny the authority of statutes made in defiance
of Magna Charta and all its principles. This, however, I will say,--that
it is a very venerable law, made by very wise and learned men, and that
the legislature, in their attempt to perpetuate it, even against the
authority of future Parliaments, have shown their judgment that it is
_fundamental_, on the same grounds and in the same manner that the act
of the fifth of Anne has considered and declared the establishment of
the Church of England to be fundamental. Magna Charta, which secured
these franchises to the subjects, regarded the rights of freeholders in
counties to be as much a fundamental part of the Constitution as the
establishment of the Church of England was thought either at that time,
or in the act of King William, or in the act of Queen Anne.
The churchmen who led in that transaction certainly took care of the
material interest of which they were the natural guardians. It is the
first article of Magna Charta, "that the Church of England shall be
free," &c, &c. But at that period, churchmen and barons and knights took
care of the franchises and free customs of the people, too. Those
franchises are part of the Constitution itself, and inseparable from it.
It would be a very strange thing, if there should not only exist
anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but that the
fundamental parts of the Constitution should be perpetually and
irreconcilably at variance with each other. I cannot persuade myself
that the lovers of our church are not as able to find effectual ways of
reconciling its safety with the franchises of the people as the
ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot
conceive how anything worse can be said of the Protestant religion of
the Church of England than this,--that, wherever it is judged proper to
give it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to deprive the body
of the people, if they adhere to their old opinions, of "their liberties
and of all their free customs," and to reduce them to a state of _civil_
servitude.
There is no man on earth, I believe, more willing than I am to lay it
down as a fundamental of the Constitution, that the Church of England
should be united and even identified with it; but, allowing this, I
cannot allow that all _laws of regulation_, made from time to time, in
support of that fundamental law, are of course equally fundamental and
equally unchangeable. This would be to confound all the branches of
legislation and of jurisprudence. The _crown_ and the personal safety of
the monarch are _fundamentals_ in our Constitution: yet I hope that no
man regrets that the rabble of statutes got together during the reign of
Henry the Eighth, by which treasons are multiplied with so prolific an
energy, have been all repealed in a body; although they were all, or
most of them, made in support of things truly fundamental in our
Constitution. So were several of the acts by which the crown exercised
its supremacy: such as the act of Elizabeth for making the _high
commission courts_, and the like; as well as things made treason in the
time of Charles the Second. None of this species of _secondary and
subsidiary laws_ have been held fundamental. They have yielded to
circumstances; particularly where they were thought, even in their
consequences, or obliquely, to affect other fundamentals. How much more,
certainly, ought they to give way, when, as in our case, they affect,
not here and there, in some particular point, or in their consequence,
but universally, collectively, and directly, the fundamental franchises
of a people equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable
kingdoms and states: equal to the subjects of the kings of Sardinia or
of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands; and more than are
to be found in all the states of Switzerland. This way of proscribing
men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the
Constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic
or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or
church in the world. Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late
and reluctantly, that the safety of the Church is utterly inconsistent
with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the
inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely sorry for it; because I
shall think the Church to be truly in danger. It is putting things into
the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never
will be put.
I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics you touch upon,
relative to the religion of the king, and his coronation oath. I shall
conclude the observations which I wished to submit to you on this point
by assuring you that I think you the most remote that can be conceived
from the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men,
and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between
more and less,--and who of course would think that the reason of the law
which obliged the king to be a communicant of the Church of England
would be as valid to exclude a Catholic from being an exciseman, or to
deprive a man who has five hundred a year, under that description, from
voting on a par with a factitious Protestant Dissenting freeholder of
forty shillings.
Recollect, my dear friend, that it was a fundamental principle in the
French monarchy, whilst it stood, that the state should be Catholic; yet
the Edict of Nantes gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a complete
civil _establishment_, with places of which only they were capable, to
the Calvinists of France,--and there were very few employments, indeed,
of which they were not capable. The world praised the Cardinal de
Richelieu, who took the first opportunity to strip them of their
fortified places and cautionary towns. The same world held and does hold
in execration (so far as that business is concerned) the memory of Louis
the Fourteenth, for the total repeal of that favorable edict; though the
talk of "fundamental laws, established religion, religion of the prince,
safety to the state," &c., &c., was then as largely held, and with as
bitter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the
struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.
Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reason does not hold,
when the religious relation of the sovereign and subject is changed; but
they who have their shop full of false weights and measures, and who
imagine that the adding or taking away the name of Protestant or
Papist, Guelph or Ghibelline, alters all the principles of equity,
policy, and prudence, leave us no common data upon which we can reason.
I therefore pass by all this, which on you will make no impression, to
come to what seems to be a serious consideration in your mind: I mean
the dread you express of "reviewing, for the purpose of altering, the
_principles of the Revolution_." This is an interesting topic, on which
I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the
ideas I have formed.
First, I cannot possibly confound in my mind all the things which were
done at the Revolution with the _principles_ of the Revolution. As in
most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the
time, well or ill understood, from passion or from vengeance, which were
not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most
direct contradiction to them. I shall not think that the _deprivation of
some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest
in the Constitution, in and to which they were born_, was a thing
conformable to the _declared principles_ of the Revolution. This I am
sure is true relatively to England (where the operation of these
_anti-principles_ comparatively were of little extent); and some of our
late laws, in repealing acts made immediately after the Revolution,
admit that some things then done were not done in the true spirit of the
Revolution. But the Revolution operated differently in England and
Ireland, in many, and these essential particulars. Supposing the
principles to have been altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the
application of those principles to very different objects the whole
spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed. In England it
was the struggle of the _great body_ of the people for the establishment
of their liberties, against the efforts of a very _small faction_, who
would have oppressed them. In Ireland it was the establishment of the
power of the smaller number, at the expense of the civil liberties and
properties of the far greater part, and at the expense of the political
liberties of the whole. It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but
a conquest: which is not to say a great deal in its favor. To insist on
everything done in Ireland at the Revolution would be to insist on the
severe and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude settlement of his
new acquisition, as _a permanent_ rule for its future government. This
no power, in no country that ever I heard of, has done or professed to
do,--except in Ireland; where it is done, and possibly by some people
will be professed. Time has, by degrees, in all other places and
periods, blended and coalited the conquered with the conquerors. So,
after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read
of in history, the Normans softened into the English. I wish you to turn
your recollection to the fine speech of Cerealis to the Gauls, made to
dissuade them from revolt. Speaking of the Romans,--"_Nos_ quamvis
toties lacessiti, jure victoriæ id solum vobis addidimus, quo pacem
tueremur: nam neque quies gentium sine armis, neque arma sine
stipendiis, neque stipendia sine tributis haberi queant. _Caetera in
communi sita sunt_: ipsi plerumque nostris exercitibus _praesidetis_:
ipsi has aliasque provincias _regitis: nil separatum clausumve_. Proinde
pacem et urbem, quam _victores victique eodem jure obtinemus_, amate,
colite." You will consider whether the arguments used by that Roman to
these Gauls would apply to the case in Ireland,--and whether you could
use so plausible a preamble to any severe warning you might think it
proper to hold out to those who should resort to sedition, instead of
supplication, to obtain any object that they may pursue with the
governing power.
For a much longer period than that which had sufficed to blend the
Romans with the nation to which of all others they were the most
adverse, the Protestants settled in Ireland considered themselves in no
other light than that of a sort of a colonial garrison, to keep the
natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain. The whole
spirit of the Revolution in Ireland was that of not the mildest
conqueror. In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did not commence at
that era, nor was religion of any kind their primary object. What was
done was not in the spirit of a contest between two religious factions,
but between two adverse nations. The statutes of Kilkenny show that the
spirit of the Popery laws, and some even of their actual provisions, as
applied between Englishry and Irishry, had existed in that harassed
country before the words _Protestant_ and _Papist_ were heard of in the
world. If we read Baron Finglas, Spenser, and Sir John Davies, we cannot
miss the true genius and policy of the English government there before
the Revolution, as well as during the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Sir John Davies boasts of the benefits received by the natives, by
extending to them the English law, and turning the whole kingdom into
shire ground. But the appearance of things alone was changed. The
original scheme was never deviated from for a single hour. Unheard-of
confiscations were made in the northern parts, upon grounds of plots and
conspiracies, never proved upon their supposed authors. The war of
chicane succeeded to the war of arms and of hostile statutes; and a
regular series of operations was carried on, particularly from
Chichester's time, in the ordinary courts of justice, and by special
commissions and inquisitions,--first under pretence of tenures, and then
of titles in the crown, for the purpose of the total extirpation of the
interest of the natives in their own soil,--until this species of subtle
ravage, being carried to the last excess of oppression and insolence
under Lord Strafford, it kindled the flames of that rebellion which
broke out in 1641. By the issue of that war, by the turn which the Earl
of Clarendon gave to things at the Restoration, and by the total
reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691, the ruin of the native
Irish, and, in a great measure, too, of the first races of the English,
was completely accomplished. The new English interest was settled with
as solid a stability as anything in human affairs can look for. All the
penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression, which were made
after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and
scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample
upon and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of
their fears, but of their security. They who carried on this system
looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in
their acts of power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the
natives would be heard on this side of the water with any other
sentiments than those of contempt and indignation. Their cries served
only to augment their torture. Machines which could answer their
purposes so well must be of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, in
England, the double name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it
would be hard to say which singly was the most odious,) shut up the
hearts of every one against them. Whilst that temper prevailed, (and it
prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory,) every measure
was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and
ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man,
and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages who were a disgrace to human
nature itself.
However, as the English in Ireland began to be domiciliated, they began
also to recollect that they had a country. The _English interest_, at
first by faint and almost insensible degrees, but at length openly and
avowedly, became an _independent Irish interest_,--full as independent
as it could ever have been if it had continued in the persons of the
native Irish; and it was maintained with more skill and more consistency
than probably it would have been in theirs. With their views, the
_Anglo-Irish_ changed their maxims: it was necessary to demonstrate to
the whole people that there was something, at least, of a common
interest, combined with the independency, which was to become the object
of common exertions. The mildness of government produced the first
relaxation towards the Irish; the necessities, and, in part, too, the
temper that predominated at this great change, produced the second and
the most important of these relaxations. English government and Irish
legislature felt jointly the propriety of this measure. The Irish
Parliament and nation became independent.
The true revolution to you, that which most intrinsically and
substantially resembled the English Revolution of 1688, was the Irish
Revolution of 1782. The Irish Parliament of 1782 bore little resemblance
to that which sat in that kingdom after the period of the first of these
revolutions. It bore a much nearer resemblance to that which sat under
King James. The change of the Parliament in 1782 from the character of
the Parliament which, as a token of its indignation, had burned all the
journals indiscriminately of the former Parliament in the
Council-Chamber, was very visible. The address of King William's
Parliament, the Parliament which assembled after the Revolution, amongst
other causes of complaint (many of them sufficiently just) complains of
the repeal by their predecessors of Poynings's law,--no absolute idol
with the Parliament of 1782.
Great Britain, finding the Anglo-Irish highly animated with a spirit
which had indeed shown itself before, though with little energy and many
interruptions, and therefore suffered a multitude of uniform precedents
to be established against it, acted, in my opinion, with the greatest
temperance and wisdom. She saw that the disposition of the _leading
part_ of the nation would not permit them to act any longer the part of
a _garrison_. She saw that true policy did not require that they ever
should have appeared in that character; or if it had done so formerly,
the reasons had now ceased to operate. She saw that the Irish of her
race were resolved to build their Constitution and their politics upon
another bottom. With those things under her view, she instantly complied
with the whole of your demands, without any reservation whatsoever. She
surrendered that boundless superiority, for the preservation of which,
and the acquisition, she had supported the English colonies in Ireland
for so long a time, and at so vast an expense (according to the standard
of those ages) of her blood and treasure.
When we bring before us the matter which history affords for our
selection, it is not improper to examine the spirit of the several
precedents which are candidates for our choice. Might it not be as well
for your statesmen, on the other side of the water, to take an example
from this latter and surely more conciliatory revolution, as a pattern
for your conduct towards your own fellow-citizens, than from that of
1688, when a paramount sovereignty over both you and them was more
loftily claimed and more sternly exerted than at any former or at any
subsequent period? Great Britain in 1782 rose above the vulgar ideas of
policy, the ordinary jealousies of state, and all the sentiments of
national pride and national ambition. If she had been more disposed
(than, I thank God for it, she was) to listen to the suggestions of
passion than to the dictates of prudence, she might have urged the
principles, the maxims, the policy, the practice of the Revolution,
against the demands of the leading description in Ireland, with full as
much plausibility and full as good a grace as any amongst them can
possibly do against the supplications of so vast and extensive a
description of their own people.
A good deal, too, if the spirit of domination and exclusion had
prevailed in England, might have been excepted against some of the means
then employed in Ireland, whilst her claims were in agitation. They
were at least as much out of ordinary course as those which are now
objected against admitting your people to any of the benefits of an
English Constitution. Most certainly, neither with you nor here was any
one ignorant of what was at that time said, written, and done. But on
all sides we separated the means from the end: and we separated the
cause of the moderate and rational from the ill-intentioned and
seditious, which on such occasions are so frequently apt to march
together. At that time, on your part, you were not afraid to review what
was done at the Revolution of 1688, and what had been continued during
the subsequent flourishing period of the British empire. The change then
made was a great and fundamental alteration. In the execution, it was an
operose business on both sides of the water. It required the repeal of
several laws, the modification of many, and a new course to be given to
an infinite number of legislative, judicial, and official practices and
usages in both kingdoms. This did not frighten any of us. You are now
asked to give, in some moderate measure, to your fellow-citizens, what
Great Britain gave to you without any measure at all. Yet,
notwithstanding all the difficulties at the time, and the apprehensions
which some very well-meaning people entertained, through the admirable
temper in which this revolution (or restoration in the nature of a
revolution) was conducted in both kingdoms, it has hitherto produced no
inconvenience to either; and I trust, with the continuance of the same
temper, that it never will. I think that this small, inconsiderable
change, (relative to an exclusive statute not made at the Revolution,)
for restoring the people to the benefits from which the green soreness
of a civil war had not excluded them, will be productive of no sort of
mischief whatsoever. Compare what was done in 1782 with what is wished
in 1792; consider the spirit of what has been done at the several
periods of reformation; and weigh maturely whether it be exactly true
that conciliatory concessions are of good policy only in discussions
between nations, but that among descriptions in the same nation they
must always be irrational and dangerous. What have you suffered in your
peace, your prosperity, or, in what ought ever to be dear to a nation,
your glory, by the last act by which you took the property of that
people under the protection of the _laws_? What reasons have you to
dread the consequences of admitting the people possessing that property
to some share in the protection of the _Constitution_?
I do not mean to trouble you with anything to remove the objections, I
will not call them arguments, against this measure, taken from a
ferocious hatred to all that numerous description of Christians. It
would be to pay a poor compliment to your understanding or your heart.
Neither _your_ religion nor _your_ politics consist "in odd, perverse
antipathies." You are not resolved to persevere in proscribing from the
Constitution so many millions of your countrymen, because, in
contradiction to experience and to common sense, you think proper to
imagine that their principles are subversive of common human society. To
that I shall only say, that whoever has a temper which can be gratified
by indulging himself in these good-natured fancies ought to do a great
deal more. For an exclusion from the privileges of British subjects is
not a cure for so terrible a distemper of the human mind as they are
pleased to suppose in their countrymen. I rather conceive a
participation in those privileges to be itself a remedy for some mental
disorders.
As little shall I detain you with matters that can as little obtain
admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear,
that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great
Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious
bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than
to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their
allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his
viceroy; or that, by the plenitude of his power, he will take that
fierce tyrant, the king of the French, out of his jail, and arm that
nation (which on all occasions treats his Holiness so very politely)
with his bulls and pardons, to invade poor old Ireland, to reduce you to
Popery and slavery, and to force the free-born, naked feet of your
people into the wooden shoes of that arbitrary monarch. I do not believe
that discourses of this kind are held, or that anything like them will
be held, by any who walk about without a keeper. Yet I confess, that, on
occasions of this nature, I am the most afraid of the weakest
reasonings, because they discover the strongest passions. These things
will never be brought out in definite propositions. They would not
prevent pity towards any persons; they would only cause it for those who
were capable of talking in such a strain. But I know, and am sure, that
such ideas as no man will distinctly produce to another, or hardly
venture to bring in any plain shape to his own mind, he will utter in
obscure, ill-explained doubts, jealousies, surmises, fears, and
apprehensions, and that in such a fog they will appear to have a good
deal of size, and will make an impression, when, if they were clearly
brought forth and defined, they would meet with nothing but scorn and
derision.