1828.] Tke Treaty of Limerick. 631 



" in words than which, he can imagine none more express, or direct/' 

 the " enjoyment of all rights and privileges, public, as well as private !" 



There is one little article the seventh which stipulates " That the 

 noblemen and gentlemen comprised in the second and third articles" 

 of the treaty [for even this right is not claimed for the Irish Catho^- 

 lies generally], " shall have liberty to ride with a sword and a case of 

 pistols, if they think ft ; and to keep a gun in their houses for the pur- 

 poses of fowling !" Here are the same people who swear to a contract in 

 the first and second articles of the treaty, by which they are to be clothed 

 in garments of silver from head to foot, covenanting in the seventh to 

 be allowed the indulgence of a cast-off pair of breeches ! 



Quibble and pretence fallacy and rottenness we are anxious to 

 cut away from a good cause, lest they defile and undermine it. We 

 would do this, apart from every consideration of virtue, from mere 

 motives of interest : one lie detected on the cross-examination of a 

 witness, shakes the whole of his evidence in the minds of the jury. 

 There is a hollowness creeping into political discussion we are afraid 

 something out of the long orations which legislators find it their duty 

 to make (there is not honesty enough in any subject to last out the 

 necessary time) which to plain men is extremely disgusting. Sir 

 Francis Burdett the representative of the knowledge and intelligence 

 the " sense keeper" of the city of Westminster pledges himself in 

 parliament to entire belief in a plea, which a commissioner of a Court 

 of Requests would never hear to its conclusion ! Mr. Peel, one of the 

 first ministers of the crown, if he believed in certain intentions of a con- 

 tract, never fulfilled, and entered into two hundred years ago, would do 

 an act which he assures us would be subversive of the constitution, and 

 dangerous to the peace and safety of the country ! And this is the 

 language, and the business (and the truth), of legislation ! 



The Treaty of Limerick, in our eyes, is of less worth than the last 

 petition of the noisy people who call themselves " The Catholic Associa- 

 tion." We cant and equivocate about claims resting upon transactions 

 done a century and a half ago ; and forget how much it is our policy to 

 have all that passed a century and a half ago forgotten. The claims of 

 Catholic Ireland stand upon a surer foundation than the faith of treaties : 

 England is bound to them by a bond worth all the written bonds that 

 ever wasted wax and parchment the bond of equitable right upon their 

 side, and political expediency on her own. The Irish Catholics are a 

 family in the state that has risen to manhood : they are of too ripe a 

 growth to be kept longer in pupillary subjection. It is now the time to 

 loosen those bonds, and they may yet be loosened cordially and in 

 friendship, which a little space more must burst amid feelings and 

 thoughts of perhaps never-to-be-forgotten enmity. " Marry your daugh- 

 ters," says the wise man, " in haste, lest they marry themselves !" Do 

 that in time, and do it in your own way, and do it amicably, which a 

 short delay will do in defiance and despite of you. 



Upon their fair and undoubted rights, and still more upon the expe- 

 diency of granting those rights -these are the grounds upon which the 

 Catholics ought to rely. The last is an argument to circumstances ; but it 

 is the better, therefore ; there is the less hazard that it will fail them. If 

 we see that they must have political freedom why let them have it. If 

 they must have some share in the large church revenues of their country 

 when those revenues are at our command without a shilling of fresh 

 cost, and the question only one of disposal why should the interests 

 of patronage be preferred, to the interests of the public the interests 



