R Irish Pariiamenls, and QJuly, 



will look hack with fatal and fruitless remorse on the incurable evil 

 perpetrated by tlieir weakness, or their corruption. 



The conduct of the popish demagogues to their OAvn adherents, is an 

 example of the faith which they will hold with us. As that honest and 

 able man, IMr. Wetherell, said, two years ago, " When the papist populace 

 shall see IMr. O'Connell and his associates, coming back to announce 

 their successes ; and to tlie question, what have you got .'' one answers, 

 a silk gown, another, a sinecure, a third, a place in the peerage ; and 

 the people at last ask, ' What have we got ?' the answer must be, ' You 

 have got robbed.' " The forty-shilling freeholders have been the scape- 

 goat in the general cleansing ; the price paid by the popish leaders, for 

 admission into parliament. Yet, but a few months have elapsed, since 

 JMr. O'Connell pledged himself, with a gravity worthy of IMr. Peel, that 

 sooner than see the forty-shilling freeholders robbed of their votes, " he 

 would resist to the death, and repel the measure, though it sliould force 

 him to either the field or the scaffold." Those are formidable declara- 

 tions : yet as the Duke of Wellington's government has adopted the plan 

 of being frightened at every thing, and the Irish popish parliament have 

 understood his Grace sufficiently to know, that the more they bully, the 

 more they will succeed, the menace served as an oratorical flourish, and 

 no man has thought it necessary to keep the agitator to his word. But 

 that agitator is too shrewd an individual, ever to have suffered the abo- 

 lition of tlie forty-shilling freeholders, if he were not conscious that out 

 of it might gi'ow a new and overwhelming power. In the first instance, 

 the abolition extinguished a strong body of Protestant voters ; nearly 

 150,000 being nullified by the act. In the next place, he knew that the 

 latitude of the popish conscience was so extensive, that the man who 

 swore to the possession of an interest of forty shillings, might as well 

 have sworn to that of ten pounds ; and the event has justified his cal- 

 culation. The forty-shilling freeholders ai*e at this moment crowding 

 in to the registry, as ten pound freeholders ; and every man of them, as 

 usual, the slave of the priest, and as ready to go the grossest lengths of 

 bigotry and violence, as ever. As early as 1793, it was declared, that 

 giving the elective franchise to the Irish populace, would be giving them 

 the parliament. Yet it was given : and the consequence followed with 

 ominous exactness. The parliament became to all intents popish. The 

 members, nominally Protestant, Avere the creation of papist influence — sent 

 to the House by papists, they were watched there by papists — they did the 

 papist business ; and on failure, were turned out by papists. That parlia- 

 ment finally perished. Under Heaven a judgment more deserved never 

 fell on an assemblage of corrupt, base-hearted, and blinded hj'pocrites. 

 The parliament was totally rotten. The peer sold his borough to the 

 highest bidder, publicly, and infamously. The best bidder bought it 

 notoriously to make the most of it ; no matter for what purpose, or by 

 what miscreant minister his vote might be hired. Men went into par- 

 liament as notoriously for the purpose of sale, as if they had stood in a 

 market, with placards of their prices on their foreheads. The minister 

 proceeded as unceremoniously to their purchase, as if they were so many 

 bullocks. This went on for a while in the midst of national indignation. 

 Every man of honour, religion, or honesty, looked with abhorrence on 

 this hideous scene of venality ; and the pai-liament, which had once been 

 the idol of the people ; the Commons, to which they had, twenty years 

 before, looked for the advocacy of their rights ; and the Lords, to whom 



