628 Catholic Resolutions : [JuNE, 



therefore, whatever rights may accrue to any of the Catholics under the 

 Treaty of Limerick, we freely consent should be taken by the whole, 

 our case will rest upon the broad ground a ground which we shall very 

 shortly, we think, make so clear that nothing but wilfulness or dulness 

 can entertain a doubt about it that that treaty never guaranteed, or was 

 intended to guarantee, to the Roman Catholics, or any of them, any 

 political privileges or eligibilities whatever. 



In the first place, it is a circumstance deserving consideration, that, at 

 the date and time at which this treaty was executed, and for a great 

 many years afterwards the Catholics of Ireland must have known what 

 was intended by it, very much better than we can possibly know now ; 

 and yet no claim at that time was ever even advanced by them, to politi- 

 cal privileges under its allowance. No trace can be shown we will not 

 speak of any such claim but of any such suggestion upon the Bill 

 brought into Parliament but a few weeks after the conclusion of the treaty, 

 for abrogating the oath of Supremacy in Ireland. In the discussion of that 

 Bill, the intent and effects of the Treaty of Limerick were argued, point- 

 edly, and referred to ; but not a word ever is hinted about the political 

 rights which it gives to the Catholics, or of the injustice committed by 

 denying them. In the same way, the speech of Sir Toby Butler before 

 the Irish House of Commons, upon this identical treaty, and the violation 

 of some part of its provisions, which referred to private right; in the 

 whole course of that speech, or of all the political and polemical discus- 

 sions which occurred in the same stormy period, not a word like a claim 

 on the part of the Catholics to the privileges which they now challenge 

 under the treaty, can be found. And that particular virtue of the treaty 

 seems never to have been discovered until near a century afterwards, 

 when a Dr. Brown (of Dublin) wrote a pamphlet on the State of Ire- 

 land : the good Doctor himself, candidly avowing (very much to the 

 distress of those who quote portions of his work in the present day,) that 

 the opinion thus put forth, was not that which was generally entertained in 

 Ireland, but entirely new, and a discovery of his own. 



It may not, however, be so very difficult to comprehend the reason 

 why 110 claim to political power or privileges was ever set up, in the 

 generation in which it was executed, by the Roman Catholics under the 

 Treaty of Limerick, when we perceive that not one word at all naming 

 or referring to political powers or privilege, appears from the beginning to 

 the end of it. The words of the first article of the treaty the only 

 clause which can be challenged strictly to apply to the Roman Catholics of 

 Ireland generally are, " that they shall enjoy such privileges, in the 

 exercise of their religion," as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, &c. 

 And again, in the same article, that they shall be " preserved from any 

 disturbances upon the account of their said religion." Now it seems 

 difficult, by any course but that of a wilful and forced construction, 

 adopted in preference to that which words obviously do and ought to 

 bear, even to argue that these terms mean any thing more than that 

 the Catholics shall have the uninterrupted exercise of the rites and 

 ceremonies of their peculiar faith. In the present day, when the only 

 privations to which the Catholics are subject are the denial of their right 

 to certain offices and political distinctions, on account of their religion, a 

 special pleader might, perhaps, attempt to contend that an Act " pre- 

 serving them from disturbances on account of their religion," gave them, 

 by inference, the right to all positions which they might claim, unless 

 debarred by the imposition of oaths incompatible w r ith that religion ; but 

 no barrister of three days standing no man of ordinary reason and intel- 



