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, ristes 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 concede
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.