my country from being free; no gratitude which should oblige Ireland to be the slave of England. In cases of robbery or usurpation, nothing is an object of gratitude, except the thing stolen, the charter spoliated. A nation's liberty can not, like her money, be rated and parceled out in gratitude. No man can be grateful or liberal of his conscience, nor woman of her honor, nor nation of her liberty. There are certain inimpartable, inherent, invaluable properties not to be alienated from the person, whether body pol itic or body natural. With the same contempt do I treat that charge which says that Ireland is insatiable; seeing that Ireland asks nothing but that which Great Britain has robbed her of

her rights and privileges. To say that Ireland is not to be satisfied with liberty, because she is not satisfied with slavery, is folly.

I laugh at that man who supposes that Ireland will not be content with a free trade and a free Constitution; and would any man advise her to be content with less?

fered this to the resistance of America, and will she refuse this to the loyalty of Ireland? But, though you do not hazard disturbance by agreeing to this resolution, you do most exceedingly hazard tranquillity by rejecting it. Do not imagine that the question will be over when this motion shall be negatived. No! it will recur in a vast variety of shapes and diversity of places. Your constituents have instructed you, in great numbers, with a powerful uniformity of sentiment, and in a style not the less awful because full of respect. They will find resources in their own virtue, if they have found none in yours. Public pride and conscious liberty, wounded by repulse, will find ways and means of vindication. You are in that situation in which every man, every hour of the day, may shake the pillars of the state. Every court may swarm with questions of right, every quay and wharf with prohibited goods. What shall the judges, what the commissioners, do upon such occasion? Shall they comply with the laws of Ireland against the claims of England, and stand firm where you have trembled? Shall they, on the other hand, not comply; and shall they persist to act against the law? Will you punish them, will you proceed against them, for not showing a spirit superior to your own? On the other hand, will you not punish them? Will you leave your liberties to be trampled on by those men? Will you bring them and yourselves, all constituted orders, executive power, judicial power, parliamentary authority, into a state of odium, impotence, and contempt; transferring the task of defending publicual, to you a leviathan-the English Attorney right into the hands of the populace, and leaving it to the judges to break the laws, and to the people to assert them? Such would be the consequence of false moderation, of irritating timidity, of inflammatory palliations, of the weak and corrupt hope of compromising with the court before you have emancipated the country.

Less import.

I have answered the only semblance of a solid reason against the motion. I will now ant objection try to remove some lesser pretenses, obviated. some minor impediments; for instance: first, that we have a resolution of the same kind already in our journals. But how often was the Great Charter confirmed? Not more frequently than your rights have been violated. Is one solitary resolution, declaratory of your rights, sufficient for a country, whose history, from the beginning unto the end, has been a course of violation?

The fact is, every new breach is a reason for a new repair; every new infringement should be a new declaration, lest charters should be overwhelmed by precedents, and a nation's rights lost in oblivion, and the people themselves lose the memory of their own freedom.

I shall hear of ingratitude, and name the argument to despise it. I know the men who use it are not grateful. They are insatiate; they are public extortioners, who would stop the tide of public prosperity, and turn it to the channel of their own wretched emolument. I know of no species of gratitude which should prevent

I shall be told that we hazard the modification of the law of Poynings, and the Judges Bill, and the Habeas Corpus Bill, and the Nullum Tempus Bill; but I ask, have you been for years begging for these little things, and have you not yet been able to obtain them? And have you been contending against a little body of eighty men, in Privy Council assembled, convocating themselves into the image of a Parliament, and ministering your high office; and have you been contending against one man, an humble individ

General, exercising Irish legislation in his own person, and making your parliamentary deliberations a blank, by altering your bills or suppress ing them; have you not been able to quell this little monster? Do you wish to know the reason? I will tell you; because you have not been a Parliament, nor your country a people. Do you wish to know the remedy? Be a Parliament, become a nation, and those things will follow in the train of your consequence.

I shall be told that tithes are shaken, being vested by force of English acts. But in answer to that, I observe, time may be a title, but an English Act of Parliament certainly can not. It is an authority which, if a judge would charge, no jury would find, and which all the electors of Ireland have already disclaimed-disclaimed unequivocally, cordially, and universally.

Sir, this is a good argument for an act of title, but no argument against a Declaration of Right. My friend, who sits above me, has a bill of confirmation.5 We do not come unprepared to Parliament. I am not come to shake property, but to confirm property, and to restore freedom. The nation begins to form-we are moldering into a people; freedom asserted, property secured, and the army, a mercenary band, likely to be dependent on your Parliament, restrained by law.

A bill to be immediately introduced on passing the Declaration, by which all laws of the English Parliament affecting property were to be confirmed by the Irish Parliament.

principle of the Revolu

people to their own resolves for liberty, passing by the tribunals of justice, and the high court of Parliament; neither imagine that, by any formation of apology, you can palliate such a commission to your hearts, still less to your children, who will sting you in your grave for interposing between them and their Maker, and robbing them of an immense occasion, and losing an opportunity which you did not create and can never restore.

and miraculous armament,' shall the historian stop at liberty, and observe, that here the principal men among us were found wanting, were awed by a weak ministry, bribed by an empty treasury; and when liberty was within their grasp, and her temple opened its folding doors, fell down, and were prostituted at the threshold?

Never was such a revolution accomplished in so | this land, which has no foundation in necessity, short a time, and with such public tranquillity. In or utility, or empire, or the laws of England, or what situation would those men, who call them- the laws of Ireland, or the laws of nature, or the selves friends of constitution and of government, laws of God. Do not suffer that power, which have left you? They would have left you with- banished your manufacturers, dishonored your out a title (as they stole it) to your estates, with- peerage, and stopped the growth of your people. out an assertion of your Constitution, or a law Do not, I say, be bribed by an export of woolen, for your army; and this state of private and pub- or an import of sugar, and suffer that power, lic insecurity, this anarchy, raging in the king-which has thus withered the land, to have existdom for eighteen months, these mock-moderators ence in your pusillanimity. Do not send the would have had the presumption to call peace. The King has no other title to his Crown than Appeal to the that which you have to your liberty. Both are founded, the throne and your tion of 1688. freedom, upon the right vested in the subject to resist by arms, notwithstanding their oaths of allegiance, any authority attempting to impose acts of power as laws; whether that authority be one man or a host, the second James or the British Parliament, every argument for the house of Hanover is equally an argument Hereafter, when these things shall be hisfor the liberties of Ireland. The Act of Settle-tory, your age of thraldom, your sud- Peroration. ment is an act of rebellion, or the sixth of George den resurrection, commercial redress, the First an act of usurpation. I do not refer to doubtful history, but to living record, to common charters, to the interpretation England has put on those charters (an interpretation made, not by words only, but crowned by arms), to the revolution she has formed upon them, to the King she has established, and, above all, to the oath of allegiance solemnly plighted to the house of Stuart, and afterward set aside in the instance of a grave and moral people, absolved by virtue of those very charters; and as any thing less than liberty is inadequate to Ireland, so is it dan-inspiration, and providence of the present mogerous to Great Britain. We are too near the ment-tell us the rule by which we shall go; British nation; we are too conversant with her assert the law of Ireland; declare the liberty of history; we are too much fired by her example the land! I will not be answered by a public to be any thing less than equals; any thing less, lie, in the shape of an amendment; nor, speakwe should be her bitterest enemies. An enemying for the subjects' freedom, am I to hear of to that power which smote us with her mace, faction. I wish for nothing but to breathe in and to that Constitution from whose blessings we this our island, in common with my fellow-subwere excluded, to be ground, as we have been,jects, the air of liberty. I have no ambition, unby the British nation, bound by her Parliament, less it be to break your chain and contemplate plundered by her Crown, threatened by her ene- your glory. I never will be satisfied so long as mies, and insulted with her protection, while we the meanest cottager in Ireland has a link of the returned thanks for her condescension, is a sys- British chain clanking to his rags. He may be tem of meanness and misery which has expired naked, he shall not be in irons. And I do see in our determination and in her magnanimity. the time at hand; the spirit is gone forth; the That there are precedents against us, I allow; Declaration of Right is planted; and though acts of power I would call them, not great men should fall off, yet the cause shall not of bind precedents; and I answer the English live; and though he who utters this should die, pleading such precedents, as they an- yet the immortal fire shall outlast the humble swered their Kings when they urged precedents organ who conveys it, and the breath of liberty, against the liberty of England. Such things are like the word of the holy man, will not die with the tyranny of one side, the weakness of the oth- the prophet, but survive him.8 er, and the law of neither. We will not be bound by them; or rather, in the words of the Declaration of Right, no doing, judgment, or proceed-teer corps. The reader will be interested to observe the ing to the contrary shall be brought into precedent or example. Do not, then, tolerate a pow-dignified in its movement; so weighty as it falls on rhythmus of the last three paragraphs; so slow and er, the power of the British government, over

Precedents

ing force.

This was an act of the British Parliament set tling the line of succession to the British Crown on the descendants of the Princess Sophia of Hanover, to the exclusion of the Stuarts.

I might, as a constituent, come to your bar and demand my liberty. I do call upon you by the laws of the land, and their violation; by the instructions of eighteen counties; by the arms,

Referring to the rapid formation of the volun

the ear; so perfectly adapted to the sentiments expressed in this magnificent passage. The effect will be heightened by comparing it with the rapid and iambic movement of the passage containing Mr. Erskine's description of the Indian chief, page 696.

Mr. Grattan then moved the Declaration of | mons, and he was voted down. He renewed Right; but the power of the English govern- the motion two years after, in connection with ment was too great in the Irish House of Com- the speech which follows.

SPEECH

OF MR. GRATTAN IN THE IRISH HOUSE OF COMMONS ON MAKING HIS SECOND MOTION FOR A DECLARATION OF IRISH RIGHT, DELIVERED APRIL 16, 1782.

INTRODUCTION.

DURING the two years which had elapsed since the preceding speech, great changes had taken place, both in England and in Ireland, which made the passing of the Declaration certain, if strongly insisted upon by the people. Mr. Grattan, therefore, in moving it a second time, uses not so much the language of argument or persuasion, as of assured triumph. He speaks of it in his first sentence as if already carried.

The object

SPEECH,' &c.

he was forced to assent to acts which deprived the Catholics of religious, and all the Irish of civil and commercial rights, though the Irish were the only subjects in these islands who had fought in his defense. But you have sought

I am now to address a free people. Ages have passed away, and this is the first already se moment in which you could be distincured. guished by that appellation. I have spoken on the subject of your liberty so often, that I have nothing to add, and have only to ad-liberty on her own principles. See the Presby mire by what Heaven-directed steps you have proceeded, until the whole faculty of the nation is braced up to the act of her own deliverance. I found Ireland on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude, and have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift-spirit of Molyneux-your genius has prevailed-Ireland is now a nation-in that new character I hail her; and, bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto perpetua 13

of Ireland with other countries.

She is no longer a wretched colony, returning Comparison thanks to her Governor for his rapine, and to her King for his oppression; nor is she now a fretful, squabbling sectary, perplexing her little wits, and firing her furious statutes with bigotry, sophistry, disabilities, and death, to transmit to posterity insignificance and war. Look to the rest of Europe. Holland lives on the memory of past achieve ments. Sweden has lost her liberty. England has sullied her great name by an attempt to enslave her colonies! You are the only peopleyou, of the nations in Europe, are now the only people who excite admiration; and in your present conduct, you not only exceed the present generation, but you equal the past. I am not afraid to turn back and look antiquity in the face. The Revolution, that great event-whether you call it ancient or modern, I know not-was tarnished with bigotry. The great deliverer-for such I must ever call the Prince of Nassauwas blemished by oppression. He assented to

This speech and the preceding are from a copy corrected by Mr. Grattan, and published in 1821.

* William Molyneux, the mathematician and as

tronomer, was originally bred to the law, and, being deeply interested for his countrymen, he wrote his celebrated work on the rights of the Irish Parliament, the first and ablest work ever produced on the subject. He was born in 1656, and died in 1698. Let her endure forever.

terians of Bangor petition for the Catholics of the South! You, with difficulties innumerable, with dangers not a few, have done what your ancestors wished, but could not accomplish; and what your posterity may preserve, but will never equal. You have molded the jarring elements of your country into a nation, and have rivaled those great and ancient states whom you were taught to admire, and among whom you are now to be recorded.

In this proceeding you had not the advantages which were common to other great Her inferior countries-no monuments, no trophies, advantages. none of those outward and visible signs of greatness, such as inspire mankind, and connect the ambition of the age which is coming on with the example of that which is going off, and forms the descent and concatenation of glory. No! You have not had any great act recorded among all your misfortunes; nor have you one public tomb to assemble the crowd, and speak to the living the language of integrity and freedom. Your historians did not supply the want of monuments. On the contrary, those narrators of your misfortunes who should have felt for your wrongs, and have punished your oppressors with oppression's natural scourge, the moral indignation of history, compromised with public villainy, and trembled; they recited your violence, they suppressed your provocation, and wrote in the chain that entrammeled their country. I am come to break that chain; and I congratulate my country, who, without any of the advantages I speak of, going forth, as it were, with nothing but a stone and a sling, and what oppression could not take away, the favor of Heaven, accomplished her own redemption, and left you nothing to add, and every thing to admire. You want no trophy now-the records of Parliament are the evidence of your glory.

I beg to observe, that the deliverance of Ireland has proceeded from her own right hand.

Her deliver

by herself.

Argument re

I rejoice at it; for, had the great acquisition | of subjects and the duty of kings. Let other of your freedom proceeded from the nations imagine that subjects are made for the ance achieved bounty of England, that great work Monarch; but we conceive that kings, and Parwould have been defective would liaments like kings, are made for the subject. have been defective both in renown and secu- The House of Commons, honoble and right rity. It was necessary that the soul of the honorable as it may be; the Lords, noble and country should have been exalted by the act of illustrious as we pronounce them, are not originher own redemption, and that England should al, but derivative. Session after session they withdraw her claim by operation of treaty, and move their periodical orbit about the source of not of mere grace and condescension. A gratu- their being-the NATION. Even the King—Majitous act of Parliament, however express, would esty-must fulfill her due and tributary course have been revocable; but the repeal of her round that great luminary; and, created by its claim, under operation of treaty, is not. In that beam and upheld by its attraction, must incline case, the Legislature is put in covenant, and to that light or go out of the system. bound by the law of nations, the only law that can legally bind Parliament. Never did this country stand so high. England and Ireland treat ex æquo. Ireland transmits to the King her claim of right, and requires of the Parliament of England the repeal of her claim of power, which repeal the English Parliament is to make under the force of a treaty, which depends on the law of nations-a law which can not be repealed by the Parliament of England. I rejoice that the people are a party to this treaty, because they are bound to preserve it. There is not a man of forty shillings freehold that is not associated in this our claim of right, and bound to die in its defense-cities, counties, associations, Protestants, and Catholics. It seems as if the people had joined in one great sacrament. A flame has descended from heaven on the intellect of Ireland, and plays round her head with a concentrated glory.

There are some who think, and a few who Defense of declare, that the associations to which the Volun- I refer are illegal. Come, then, let us

teer Associations.

torted on the the Declara

opposers of

tion.

Ministers-we mean the ministers who have been dismissed; I rely on the good intentions of the present-former ministers, I say, have put questions to us. We beg to put questions to them. They desired to know by what authority this nation had acted. This nation desires to know by what authority they acted. By what authority did government enforce the articles of war? By what authority does government establish the post-office? By what authority are our merchants bound by the East India Company's charter? By what authority has Ireland one hundred years been deprived of her export trade? By what authority are her peers deprived of their judicature? By what authority has that judicature been transferred to the peers of Great Britain, and our property, in its last resort, referred to the decision of a non-resident, unauthorized, illegal, and unconstitutional tribunal? Will ministers say it was the authority of the British Parliament ? On what ground, then, do they place the question between the try the charge. And first, I ask, what government on one side, and the people on the were the grievances? An army imposed on us other? The government, according to their by another country—that army rendered perpet- own statement, has been occupied to supersede ual-the Privy Council of both countries made a the lawgiver of the country, and the people to part of our Legislature our Legislature depriv-restore him. His Majesty's late ministers thought ed of its originating and propounding poweranother country exercising over us supreme legislative authority-that country disposing of our property by its judgments, and prohibiting our trade by its statutes! These were not grievances, but spoliations; they left you nothing. When you contended against them, you contended for the whole of your condition. When the minister asks by what right, we refer him to our Maker. We sought our privileges by the right which we have to defend our property against a robber, our life against a murderer, our country against an invader, whether coming with civil or military force, a foreign army, or a foreign Legislature. This is a case that wants no precedent. The revolution wanted no precedent; for such things arrive to reform a course of bad precedents, and, instead of being founded on precedent, become such. The gazing world, whom they came to save, begins by doubt and concludes by worship. Let other nations be deceived by the sophistry of courts-Ireland has studied politics in the lair of oppression; and, taught by suffering, comprehends the right

they had quelled the country when they bought the newspapers, and they represented us as wild men, and our cause as visionary; and they pensioned a set of wretches to abuse both; but we took little account of them or their proceedings, and we waited, and we watched, and we moved, as it were, on our native hills, with the minor remains of our parliamentary army, until that minority became Ireland! Let those ministers now go home, and congratulate their king on the deliverance of his people. Did you imagine that those little parties, whom, three years ago, you beheld in awkward squads parading the streets, would arrive to such distinction and effect? What was the cause? For it was not the sword of the volunteer, nor his muster, nor his spirit, nor his promptitude to put down accidental disturbance, public discord, nor his own unblamed and distinguished deportment: this was much; but there was more than this. The 4 Lord North and his associates are here referred to.

The "present" ministers were Lord Rockingham, Lord Shelburne, Mr. Fox, &c., composing the Whig administration, which followed that of Lord North.

upper orders, the property and the abilities of That bill must fall, or the Constitution can not the country, formed with the Volunteer; and the stand. That bill was originally limited by this volunteer had sense enough to obey them. This House to two years, and it returned from Enunited the Protestant with the Catholic, and the gland without the clause of limitation. What! landed proprietor with the people. There was a bill making the army independent of Parliastill more than this-there was a continence ment, and perpetual? I protested against it which confined the corps to limited and legiti- then; I have struggled with it since; and I am mate objects. There was a principle which now come to destroy this great enemy of my preserved the corps from adultery with French country. The perpetual Mutiny Bill must vanpolitics. There was a good taste which guard-ish out of the statute book. The excellent tract ed the corps from the affectation of such folly. of Molyneux was burned—it was not answered, This, all this, made them bold; for it kept them and its flame illumined posterity. This evil innocent, it kept them rational. No vulgar rant paper shall be burned; but burned like a felon, against England, no mysterious admiration of that its execution may be a peace-offering to the France, no crime to conceal, no folly to blush people, and that a Declaration of Right may be for, they were what they professed to be; and planted on its guilty ashes. A new Mutiny Bill that was nothing less than society asserting her must be formed, after the manner of England, liberty according to the frame of the British and a Declaration of Right flaming in its preConstitution-her inheritance to be enjoyed in amble. As to the legislative powers of the Priperpetual connection with the British empire. vy Council, I conceive them to be utterly inadI do not mean to say that there were not divers missible, against the Constitution, against the violent and unseemly resolutions. The immensi- privileges of Parliament, and against the dignity ty of the means was inseparable from the ex- of the realm. Do not imagine such power to cess. Such are the great works of nature-such be a theoretical evil; it is, in a very high deis the sea; but, like the sea, the waste and ex-gree, a practical evil. I have here an inventory cess were lost in the immensity of its blessings, benefits, and advantage; and now, having given a Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the people to Parliament, and thus close, pacifically and majestically, a great work, which will place them above censure and above panegyric. Those associations, like other institutions, will perish; they will perish with the occasion that gave them being; and the gratitude of their country will write their epitaph:

"This phenomenon, the departed Volunteer, justified by the occasion, with some alloy of public evil, did more public good to Ireland than all her institutions. He restored the liberties of his country; and thus, from his grave, he answers his enemies."

Connected by freedom, as well as by allegiance, the two nations, Great Britain England and Ireland now and Ireland, form a constitutional conconfederate. federacy as well as an empire. The Crown is one link, the Constitution another; and, in my mind, the latter link is the most powerful. You can get a king any where; but England is the only country with whom you can get and participate a free Constitution. This makes England your natural connection, and her king your natural as well as your legal sovereign. This is a connection, not as Lord Coke has idly said, not as Judge Blackstone has foolishly said, not as other judges have ignorantly said, by conquests; but, as Molyneux has said, and as I now say, by compact-that compact is a free Constitution. Suffer me now to state some Essential principles of the of the things essential to that free Confederacy. Constitution. They are as follows: The independency of the Irish Parliament-the exclusion of the British Parliament from any authority in this realm-the restoration of the Irish judicature, and the exclusion of that of Great Britain. As to the perpetual Mutiny Bill, it must be more than limited-it must be effaced.

of bills, altered and injured by the interference of the Privy Councils-Money Bills originated by them-Protests by the Crown, in support of those Money Bills-prorogation following those Protests. I have a Mutiny Bill of 1780, altered by the Council and made perpetual-a bill in 1778, where the Council struck out the clause repealing the Test Act-a Militia Bill, where the Council struck out the compulsory clause, requiring the Crown to proceed to form a militia, and left it optional to his majesty's ministers whether there should be a militia in Ireland. I have the Money Bill of 1775, when the Council struck out the clause enabling his majesty to take a part of our troops for general service, and left it to the minister to withdraw the forces against act of Parliament. I have to state the altered Money Bill of 1771; the altered Money Bill of 1775; the altered Money Bill of 1780. The day would expire before I could recount their ill doings. I will never consent to have men-God knows whom-ecclesiastics, &c., &c.; men unknown to the constitution of Parliament, and only known to the minister who has breathed into their nostrils an unconstitutional existence-steal to their dark divan, which they call the Council, to do mischief, and make nonsense of bills which their Lordships, the House of Lords, or we, the House of Commons, have thought good and meet for the people. No! These men have no legislative qualifications; they shall have no legislative power. 1st. The repeal of the perpetual Mutiny Bill, and the dependency of the Irish army on the Irish Parliament; 2d. The abolition of the legislative power of the Council; 3d. The abrogation of the claim of England to make law for Ireland; the exclusion of the English House of Peers, and of the English King's Bench from any judicial authority in this realm; the restoration of the Irish Peers to their final judicature; the independency of the Irish Par