tory speeches? Though Boston was to be starved, though Hancock and Adams were proscribed, yet at the feet of these very men the Parliament of Great Britain was obliged to kneel, flatter, and cringe; and, as it had the cruelty at one time to denounce vengeance against these men, so it had the meanness afterwards to implore their forgiveness. Shall he who called the Americans, "Hancock and his crew," shall he presume to reprehend any set of men for inflammatory speeches? It is this accursed American war that has led us, step by step, into all our present misfortunes and national disgraces. What was the cause of our wasting forty millions of money and sixty thousand lives? The American war. What was it that produced the French rescript and a French war? The American war. What was it that produced the Spanish manifesto and Spanish war? The American war. What was it that armed forty-two thousand men in Ireland with the arguments carried on the points of forty thousand bayonets? The American war. For what are we about to incur an additional debt of twelve or fourteen millions? This accursed, cruel, diabolical American war.

RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT

-GRATTAN.

Let us reflect on the necessary limits of all human legislation. No legislature has a right to make partial laws; it has no right to make arbitrary laws, I mean laws contrary to reason. Neither has it a right to institute any inquisition into men's

thoughts, nor to punish any man merely for his religion. It can have no power to make a religion for men, since that would be to dethrone the Almighty. I presume it will not be arrogated on the part of the British Legislature, that his Majesty, by and with the advice of the Lords spiritual and temporal, etc., can enact that he will appoint and constitute a new religion for the people of this empire; or that, by an order in Council, the consciences and creeds of his subjects might be suspended. Nor will it be contended, I apprehend, that any authoritative or legislative measure could alter the law of the hypothenuse. Whatever belongs to the authority of God or to the laws of nature is necessarily beyond the province and sphere of human institution and government. The Roman Catholic, when you disqualify him on the ground of his religion, may with great justice tell you that you are not his God, that he cannot mould or fashion his faith by your decrees. When once man goes out of his sphere, and says he will legislate for God, he would, in fact, make himself God.

But this I do not charge upon the Parliament, because in none of the penal acts has the Parliament imposed a religious creed. The qualifying oath as to the great number of offices and as to seats in parliaments scrupulously evades religious distinctions. A dissenter of any class may take it. A deist, an atheist, may likewise take it. The Catholics are alone excepted; and for what reason? If a deist be fit to sit in Parliament, it can hardly be urged that a Christian is unfit. If an atheist be competent to legislate for his country, surely this privilege can

not be denied to the believer in the divinity of our Saviour. If it be contended that, to support the Church, it is expedient to continue these disabilities, I dissent from that opinion. If it could, indeed, be proved, I should say that you had acted in defiance of all the principles of human justice and freedom, in having taken away their Church from the Irish, in order to establish your own; and in afterwards attempting to secure that establishment by disqualifying the people and compelling them at the same time to pay for its support. This is to fly directly in the face of the plainest canons of the Almighty. For the benefit of eleven hundred to disqualify four or five millions, is the insolent effort of bigotry, not the benignant precept of Christianity; and all this, not for the preservation of their property, for that was secured, but for bigotry, for intolerance, for avarice, for a vile, abominable, illegitimate, and atrocious usurpation. The laws of God cry out against it; the laws of England, and the spirit and principles of its Constitution, cry out against such a system.

DEFENSE OF CATHOLICS GRATTAN.

Whenever one sect degrades another on account of religion, such degradation is the tyranny of a sect. When you enact that, on account of his religion, no Catholic shall sit in Parliament, you do what amounts to the tyranny of a sect. When you enact that no Catholic shall be a sheriff, you do what amounts to the tyranny of a sect. When you enact that no Catholic shall be a general, you do what

amounts to the tyranny of a sect. There are two descriptions of laws: the municipal law, which binds the people, and the law of God, which binds the Parliament and the people. Whenever you do any act which is contrary to His laws, as expressed in His work, which is the world, or in His book, the Bible, you exceed your right; whenever you rest any of your establishments on that excess, you rest it on a foundation which is weak and fallacious; whenever you attempt to establish your government, or your property, or your Church, on religious restrictions, you establish them on that false foundation, and you oppose the Almighty; and though you had a host of mitres on your side, you banish God from your ecclesiastical Constitution, and freedom from your political. In vain shall men endeavor to make this the cause of the Church: they aggravate the crime by the endeavor to make their God their fellow in the injustice. Such rights are the rights of ambition; they are the rights of conquest; and, in your case, they have been the rights of suicide. They begin by attacking liberty; they end by the loss of empire.

POLITICAL DISHONESTY SHERIDAN.

Is this a time for selfish intrigues and the little dirty traffic for lucre and emolument? Does it suit the honor of a gentleman to ask at such a moment? Does it become the honesty of a minister to grant? What! In such an hour as this, at a moment pregnant with the national fate, when, pressing as the exigency may be, the hard task of squeezing the

money from the pockets of an impoverished people, from the toil, the drudgery of the shivering poor, must make the most practiced collector's heart ache while he tears it from them, can it be that people of high rank, and professing high principles, that they or their families should seek to thrive on the spoils of misery, and fatten on the bread wrested from industrious poverty? O, shame! shame! Is it intended to confirm the pernicious doctrine so industriously propagated, that all public men are impostors, and that every politician has his price? Or, even where there is no principle in the bosom, why does not prudence hint to the mercenary and the vain to abstain a while, at least, and wait the fitting of the times? Improvident impatience! Nay, even from those who seem to have no direct object of office or profit, what is the language which their actions speak?

"The Throne is in danger! We will support the Throne; but-let us share the smiles of royalty!" "The order of nobility is in danger! I will fight for nobility," says the Viscount; "but-my zeal would be greater if I were made an Earl!" "Rouse all the Marquis within me," exclaims the Earl, "and the Peerage never turned forth a more undaunted champion in its cause than I shall prove!" "Stain my green ribbon blue," cries out the illustrious Knight, "and the fountain of honor will have a fast and faithful servant!"

What are the people to think of our sincerity? What credit are they to give to our professions? Is this system to be persevered in? Is there nothing that whispers to that right honorable gentleman